Good news - bad news -- OTA Wednesday
Published Wed, Jan 31 2007 12:42 AM
Technorati Tags: Blogging
Blogger tip of the day: Use good anti-virus software, and scan regularly! I received what appeared to be a nasty note in my inbox today from one of my email providers. Looking at the message headers, it looked legitimate, but I couldn't be sure. There was an attachment you see, and the virus filters blocked it.
I have anti-virus software installed on all of my computers. I make sure it's updated on a daily basis, and I run an automated scan every night. Even so, this little bit of email put my teeth on edge, so I ran a deep scan on all of my machines, except one, and that one's turned off until I get a chance to run one on it too.
The good news is no infected files were found. The bad news is it took a few hours to run the scans. I think the good news outweighs the bad news. I'd hate to have my machines turned into zombie spam-bots after all, or even worse, lose the source code to my site.
Speaking of source, code, I spent some time tonight working on auto-discovery for trackback URIs so that I could automatically send trackback pings when I post. Once again, it's a case of good news and bad news.
The good news is, the code works. I tried it out on a few of my posts, and it dutifully crawled every link in the posts (the actual post content, not the sidebar and stuff). On the sites that I linked to that included the auto-discovery RDF it found the trackback URIs.
The bad news is, it takes a while to retrieve every page I link to when I use the blogger's oasis to participate in linkfests. Some blogs are fast and some are slow. Even so, when there's a lot of blogs the time adds up. Add that to the fact that not all the links are going to blog posts and the process takes even longer.
There's more mixed news though. About a third of the blogs I linked to actually have the auto-discovery RDF. Some of the best blogs (in my opinion, your mileage may vary) don't include it. Some others that I wouldn't expect to see it in do.
One blog maintains a permanent floating ping festival. That's pretty cool, except that the page for that one actually has about half a dozen different instances of the auto-discovery RDF. Not one of them matches the page's URI though, so I can't choose which one to use.
I guess I shouldn't complain though. Trackbacks are a service that bloggers provide as a favor to other bloggers. Nobody's required to support them, and the levels of support vary from platform to platform.
Heck, I'm grateful that people do provide them. They make it easy to network with other bloggers, and I think that that's cool. I especially like Ferdinand T. Cat's plan to rule the world through the blogosphere via the blogger's oasis.
Since I started participating in linkfests, I've seen a big jump in my site traffic. I think that's a cool thing because it means more people are reading my stuff.
One of the coolest things about the blogger's oasis is the linkfest chooser. This little gem makes it incredibly easy to find and connect to open trackback posts. Maybe even a little too easy.
One of my friends in the blogosphere commented on a post earlier this month that the linkfest chooser makes it easy to cheat on trackbacks. She said "You used to have to go to everyones site in order to TB..now u can cheat and link without even readin the post".
She's right you know. And to think... here I was trying to completely automate the trackback process from my end. At least I go out and read every post I link to. Now though, I do it after linking.
I also read every post that somebody links to one of mine and sends a ping for. Thanks to you all my Internet habit's getting serious. I find myself spending a couple of hours a night just reading all of your posts. I have to say, it's a lot of fun.
I still plan to automate as much of the trackback process as I can. Since the auto-discovery process isn't turning out to be as useful as I hoped, I'm going to see if I can't automate my usage of the linkfest chooser. Ferdinand's got the trackback URI selection nailed there, and I know he's not using the "official" method of autodiscovery, at least not for all of the trackback URIs.
This is your open trackbacks post for Wedneday, January 31, 2007.
If you have something interesting you'd like to share, feel free to link it here and leave a trackback.
Just remember the trackback policy.
For the best exposure, go to the blogger's oasis and use the linkfest chooser to choose the posts you'd like to hook up with.
Trackback URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/track.aspx?postid=439
Permalink URI for this post: http://perrinelson.com/2007/1/31/439.aspx
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