Trackbacks have been disabled on mu.nu blogs for ages.  It was a spam problem, and it was the right decision.  It was also unfortunate, because trackbacks are a great way of linking blogs together.

I had always intended on installing a third party solution, but I never got around to investing the time into integrating one into my blog.

Well, this week I posted about the Elections Canada Investigators' Manual.  The whole was great big red herring, according to most Liberals, but I did get links from National Newswatch, Bourque, and Jack's Newswatch.  I linked back to them by way of welcoming the surge of readers, and Jason Cherniak posted a comment, in a light-hearted tone, "No welcome for my readers?"

For the record, Jason's post is "Nice try, Janke".

The thing is that I would like to welcome all readers, especially those being sent from other blogs.  But adding individual call-outs is just too tedious.  I mean, that's what trackbacks were for.

So I considered putting up a special "Hello!" aimed at readers from Jason's blog, but then I couldn't commit to doing that every time.  I considered sending Jason an apology and an explanation, but then that seemed like a copout. 

The real solution was to finally get trackbacks back on the blog.  That way Jason could simply send a trackback ping to my blog from his post, and he would be linked, sending readers to his post, which is the best sort of "Thank you!" anyone can offer.

So I spent the morning cobbling something together.

I resurrected my long-dormant Haloscan account.  What I did not want, though, is Haloscan comments, and especially, the popup model of displaying Haloscan information.  This is what I did to get around that, a variation of the system described here.  Each post has its own Haloscan-generated RSS feed of trackback links.  I take that trackback feed and pass it through RSS-to-Javascript which turns the RSS feed into a sequence of Java statements that output the equivalent HTML code.  That Java code is imbedded in the right spot of the page, and hey presto, an inline listing of trackbacks.

Very cool!

So Jason, please feel free to issue a trackback ping.  Not only does that let me know you've linked something, it draws traffic over so that people can consider your take on my post and on the issue being discussed as a whole.

Everyone else who blogs -- start using trackbacks too.  I think they're a great way to pull traffic from one blog to another.  Make sure your excerpt or summary is enticing.

Readers -- study the trackbacks and consider if another blogger has something interesting to say.  These bloggers took the time write on the same subject or to respond to my post, and then to send the trackback ping.  I bet they have something interesting to say.

The work is not done yet.  I might still work on the styling, but more importantly, I would like to turn this into a PHP-based solution instead of Java.  The advantage is that a server-side solution (PHP) shows the trackback links to the search engine spiders, which then causes the link juice to shared out.  It's a small thing, perhaps, but it's the sort of thing that would further encourage people to use trackbacks.

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