Blogging Roller

As I've been working on Roller's further-reading feature for the 0.9.7 release, which is essentially the same as Mark Pilgim's automatic backlinks and further reading implementation, I've been trying to learn more about other weblog entry linking mechanisms such as Movable Type's Trackback feature and Ian Hickson's Pingback.

Luckily for me, Ted Neward, Simon Fell, and Sam Ruby have been blogging about this recently. Ted wonders which technique is most popular, Simon says trackback is the leader, and Sam explains some of the differences between Trackback, Pingback, and harvesting backlinks from referer logs (a.k.a. automatic linkbacks).

In an earlier post, Sam suggested a very interesting WIBNI enhancement to Trackback: "Wouldn't It Be Nice If instead of URL encoded parameters, one could simply POST the RSS item that contains all the yummy goodies that one could imagine and let the server decide what pieces it wanted to keep and what pieces it chooses to ignore? This is how the RESTLog API works today..."

Edgar Sanchez: We are not programmers to defend and protect Java (or Visual Basic, C#, Cobol, Lisp, etc., etc.), we are not programmers to defend and protect object orientation (or relational databases, AOP, etc.), hell, we are not programmers to defend and protect Sun (or Microsoft, IBM, ...) We are programmers to create software solutions for problems that people have (those people could be programmers also, of course) and we use the better tools of the bench.