TrackBacks Welcome

For the past couple of days I've been undergoing a self-inflicted crash course in TrackBacks. Their support was missing on my site and I put some time aside to catch up.

For those of you who are new to the concept of TrackBacks: you can think of them as a short notification of another blog owner that you're talking about him/her in your blog. For example, you found a post in somebody else's blog that you really liked and wanted to comment on it. But instead of leaving a comment in that blog you want to write up a post yourself and refer to that person's post in your own blog. This "reference" is a TrackBack. You can read more about TrackBacks at movabletype.org.

As I started implementing support for posting and accepting TrackBacks my first impression was, "What a mess". There's nothing carved in stone (except RSS 2.0 at this point) and there are "suggestions" and "extensions" everywhere. Chris has a nice little summary of a couple of them.

Anyway, feel free to trackback. I retain the right to delete spamming, offensive and downright irrelevant trackbacks. I value the quality of content. Also, the RSS feed now includes full posts, along with post and article comments.

If anyone is interested in implementation details let me know.

P.S. A special note to Nigerian businessmen: I will subscribe you to every [foul] newsletter known to people for sending "business" my way.