Another small to-do : log trackback pings sent outward
08-September-2005
permalink trackbacks (3) email thisFunny how these little bells and whistles can seem o=unimportant until you start creating content yourself :o)
I've long known that we should do something about logging the pings hat the trackback machinery attempts to send out. A trackback 'ping' is a little request we make to a trackback-aware server's "trackback:ping" url for their content we are linked to. That request includes the data about our own content. The other server can, if so configured, use that data - for instance to display a link back to our content's commentary on theirs.
Extended text for this entry:
KNotes is trackback aware. When you post an entry which includes some links through an external editor API client like ecto, or if you create a KNLink object through the web interfaces, our system attempts to send a ping to the url being linked. The first step is to read-in the page content and look for a snippet of RDF in it. If present, that RDF should tell our system the "trackback:ping" url for that page as well as some info about it. If KNotes finds a "trackback:ping" url, it calls it.
What Knotes does *not* do at the moment is let the KNotes author know about any of that process. It has so far been up to us authors to deduce that a ping was sent by looking for a link back to us on the other site. But this can be frustrating and requires some understanding of the way the web works, and it is completely uninfomative when there is no back-link in the other content. Did our system attempt to scan the page being linked to? Did it connect? Retry ( it will retry if necessary)? Did it find the RDF and a "trackback:ping" url? Did it cll that url? etc...
So - we are looking into 3 new features. The task is complicated by the fact that the trackback machinery runs in a thread (so that you do not have to wait for other servers before getting feedback about your own edits)
- log the events into the zope events log. This is simple to achieve.
- add/update a property with trackback log info in the KNotes content containing the outgoing link, so that the author can easily query their own pieces of content to find out about the pings being sent
- email the author - probably only worth doing in the case of a successful ping
We'll post again when we've made some progress on those. We won't try to be thorough yet - just to do enough to make using KNotes more comfortable for authors who link a lot.
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