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Dave Johnson on blogging, open source and Java

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Saturday Jan 18, 2003

Separating the linkbacks from the feedbacks.

I still owe you a write-up of the Roller linkback implementation. I'll get around to that when I get around to finishing it. I'm way too busy with other things to work on linkbacks right now, but I have been giving it some thought.

The linkback feedback problem is a bit of a challenge. I think the only way around it is to use RSS autodiscovery to find the referer's RSS feed and then parse the referer's page title, excerpt, and permalink - as suggested by Sam Ruby. Since some refering weblogs and websites don't have RSS autodiscovery or even RSS feeds, some additional care is required. Here is my plan:

When a request comes in for a specific day or a specific weblog entry, Roller will parse the refering page.
  • If the refering page contains an RSS autodiscovery link tag and the RSS feed includes a reference, then Roller will store the referer info gleaned from the RSS feed as a linkback and will set the display flag to true. The linkback will be immediately displayed on the Roller weblog page (assuming the page template includes the linkback macros, of course).
  • If the refering page does not contain an RSS autodiscovery link, but the referer info can be parsed from the page's HTML, then Roller will store the referer as a linkback, but will set the display flag to false. The linkback will be invisible to all except the weblog's author. The author must take action (e.g. clicking a 'show' button) to make it visible to his or her readers.
In effect, Roller will assume that referers that can be parsed out of an RSS feed are valid and that referers that must be parsed out of HTML are invalid.
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