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As Mrs BetterComms says, it’s only a small thing, but a small thing that is becoming increasingly frustrating.
I usually read my feeds first thing in the morning, on the way to client offices in my chauffer-driven Volvo (aka ‘bus’). When I view my aggregator feeds and find a post I want to blog about, I have to actually fire up a web connection and meander over to the blogpost in question to find two things:
- A non-feedburner permalink (not so essential but nice to have)
- A trackback uri.
There is currently no way to view those trackback codes in my aggregator, making it a lot of steps harder to let the author know I have continued the conversation. Very frustrating.
Can the software developers on the blogging platforms and aggregators fix this? Please?
{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Dan Hill 02.21.06 at 8:19 pm
Lee, I hear you on the trackback issue. Pinging is not the most straightforward activity in the world, in my case, having to have three websites open in the browser to do it.
But I have the horrible feeling they may have been left out of aggregators to avoid spam.
Lee 02.22.06 at 8:43 am
I fear you may be right, Dan. But HOW annoying is it?!!
Dan Hill 02.22.06 at 9:56 am
Oh, isn’t it just.
Maybe a permission filter for the originating author could be thrown in.
Something like:
Dear blogger, Mr Hopkins at leehopkins.net has subscribed to your blog. Do you wish to allow this person to view your trackback URIs with this feed?
Lee 02.22.06 at 11:03 am
Excellent idea — what I’ll do is include Jack from CurioStudio (GreatNews reader) in on this thread and see what his views are.
Jack 02.22.06 at 12:47 pm
Lee, feedburner does include orginal permlink in . I don’t know any reader using it so far, but it’s fairly easy to support it. The trackback uri is much hard to handle though. Unless someone comes up with an extension, the uri is not included in rss feed.
Jack 02.22.06 at 12:49 pm
sorry. the feedburner element name was filtered. it’s <feedburner:origLink>
Lee 02.22.06 at 2:16 pm
So Jack, are there any plans over at GreatNews to include the origLink element? Do you guys have any ‘in’ with Feedburner or blogging platform developers to offer a trackback element?
Jack 02.23.06 at 12:40 pm
I guess it would be useful to have a global option in GreatNews so that feeds from feedburner will store their original links instead of feedburner’s. As for the trackback uri, FeedBurner probably won’t be able to solve it alone, because the oringal rss feeds don’t have trackback uri in the first place. To solve this problem we would have to extend rss spec, or introduce some widely acceptable extension. Randy Charles Morin, who is on RSS advisory board, sent me an email a couple of days ago about feedbacks on RSS 2.0.2 spec. I think that’s a pretty good place to request this extension.
Spec: http://www.rssboard.org/rss-draft-1
Group: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/rss-public/
Jack 02.23.06 at 12:45 pm
I just found there’s already an extension for trackbacks. The spec is available here: http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/
Lee 02.24.06 at 9:03 am
Hey Jack,
Amazing work, mate — thanks! Now I just have to get WP developers to incorporate it into feeds. We may crack this yet!!