There's been some conversation lately about how TrackBack handles (or doesn't handle) international character sets. After looking at existing practices that have evolved in non-English-speaking countries, a great conversation on Sam Ruby's site yielded some useful sample code that you can try out. TypePad sites also handle character sets correctly for TrackBacks as well.
Haloscan has just added support for hosted TrackBack for those using tools that don't have support built in.
Yahoo! Korea Blogs has just launched support for TrackBack in their (Korean-language) weblog service.
A new TrackBack-enabled service that's near and dear to our hearts has launched. It's called TypePad.
As of today, Plogs.net is the first LiveJournal-based system to fully support TrackBack. Nice work.
Userland appears to have TrackBack working in Manila, both incoming and outgoing.
Users of the Squishdot publishing system now have an excellent set of instructions over at the Zope site detailing how to enable TrackBack for their websites. It's good to see the protocol being enabled for users of another popular application.
Dave Winer has put up a new document-in-progress called Trackback in the UserLand environment, which covers his work in implementing TrackBack in Userland's Manila and eventually Radio. It's great to see the protocol being more tightly integrated and adopted in new publishing systems. Ping!
We've created a guide called A Beginner's Guide to TrackBack, since some people were having trouble understanding exactly what the TrackBack protocol does and how it can be used. The explanation is from a beginner's perspective, and should be clear enough to get you started.
We had a chance to demo TrackBack at Seabury. The experience made us realize explaining TrackBack is a lot easier when doing a live demonstration.
Antonio at blogpocket.com came up with some PHP code to count the number of TrackBack pings for the standalone TrackBack version, by scanning the automatically-produced RSS files.
To be used like this:
<?php echo trackbackCount([TrackBack ID]); ?>
Per the TrackBack changes in Movable Type 2.5, we've made the corresponding changes to the TrackBack specification:
TrackBack pings should now be sent using HTTP POST instead of GET. The old behavior is deprecated, and support for GET will be removed in January 2003.
In the RDF, the TrackBack Ping URL should now be stored in the trackback:ping element, rather than rdf:about.
Changed the format of the sample TrackBack Ping URL to use the PATH_INFO instead of the query string.
The embedded RDF used for auto-discovery no longer causes pages to fail validation.
Added sample code for auto-discovery.
We have also released a new version of the Standalone TrackBack tool (documentation), which implements the changes in the spec.
Thanks to Paul Prescod and others for suggestions and guidance on making TrackBack more REST-like.
Rael Dornfest has posted instructions for integrating the standalone TrackBack implementation into bloxsom.
In other TrackBack-related news, Jim Winstead, Bill Turner, and Matt Kingston have written their own implementations of TrackBack, in use on their own sites. Matt also posted a tutorial for implementing TrackBack.
Phil Ulrich has developed an interesting TrackBack-related plugin: TrackForward. It provides a system for displaying TrackBack URLS that were pinged by an entry.
You can find more of Phil's plugins here.
