Pen-Elayne on the Web

And You May Ask Yourself, How Do I Work This?

I should probably give a shout-out to Laura about these two techie questions, but if anyone else wants to tackle them be my guest.

First, I had a very instructive back-and-forth with Dave Johnson over trackbacks, wherein he finally explained what they are. They differ from permalinks in that "if you want to show readers here [i.e., on Dave's blog] that you linked to [a post], so they will come visit your weblog, then you want a trackback notice to appear here. It provides a link to your posting, and an excerpt." So I finally get that, except I'm still not sure how one tracks something back. So I've clicked on Dave's trackback for that post, and we'll see if this bit appears therein. Haloscan has a section where it says you can manage incoming trackback pings but I'm totally befuddled by it so I don't think a trackback mechanism will show up on Pen-Elayne soon unless Laura holds my hand through it...

Update the First: Okay, I think I've got it. I was looking for something automatic, but trackback pinging is mostly manual, and Dave explained it pretty well. If you want to plug your blog via performing a trackback, you have to go to that Haloscan page and type in or copy/paste in the appropriate fields:

the trackback URL

the title of your entry wherein the trackback link appears

the permalink to your entry

the relevant excerpt
Then you click the "ping" button and presumably your stuff will show up on the other person's trackback. Still waiting to see if mine shows up on Dave's...

Update the Second: Thanks, Rook, I now have Trackback capabilities (which helps a bit on lengthening my content table)! Still nothing of mine on Dave's Trackback though...

My other current frustration is that, particularly with the reordering of my blogroll and the addition of some cool buttons and such, my sidebar content is often longer than my blog content, and the sidebar design breaks off somewhere in the middle. I have no idea how to lengthen the sidebar without posting more content to the blog itself. I still like this Blogger template and don't want to give it up yet if I can help it, but I wouldn't mind it looking a bit neater...