Progress report

By Lisa on April 13, 2003 11:02 AM | techie stuff | Permalink | Comments (14)

Dania and I were playing with category trackback today. She had it 1/2 right and I had it 1/2 right, so now we're both better off.

But! Neither of us get pings when we just post an entry with a link to the other's site.

Anyway, if someone could point out what I missed, I'd be grateful!

Update (4/21): It works now! I have no idea what it thinks changed.

Phil's plugin.

The part that I'd missed in the instructions was enabling a category for pings. I'd never really paid attention to the "Edit category attributes" link on the Category page.

Dania didn't upload the plugin.

14 Comments

milbertus said:

When you say that you don't get pings when someone pings a category, what exactly do you mean? If you mean that you get the e-mail that a ping was received, but it doesn't show up on your archive, then this is expected behavior. When your MT gets a ping, it only rebuilds your index templates - it doesn't rebuild your category or individual archives. So, unless you rebuild the category in question, its pings won't show up.

I'm currently using PHP on my site to dynamically retrieve the pings for an entry, and I was thinking about implementing something simlar for categories. I could give you the code (or post it), if you want.

April 13, 2003 11:59 AM

Lisa said:

We both get the ping if you use the bookmarklet to make your post. But when I just go in and type up a post and refer to Dania's site, no ping is sent. No email is received. No ping appears to be sent by my MT.

I was mostly looking to use that to help satisfy my nosey-factor. The "who just linked to me" part of this crazy blogging thing.

April 13, 2003 12:13 PM

kristine said:

Are you all fixed up now? I replied on SG with a bit more clarification on it

And I think that this is kinda what A is talking about

April 13, 2003 1:19 PM

Lisa said:

Kristine... only sort of. I still am not getting pinged when someone blogs about me.

April 13, 2003 1:24 PM

kristine said:

Is it possible that you don't have Trackback Autodiscovery turned on? I think that's more for posts, though.

But it should have just pinged you when I posted and it didn't ... off to look for more ideas about why it wouldn't work for you!!!!!

April 13, 2003 1:43 PM

Lisa said:

Autodiscovery is enabled. to it being difficult when I feel the call of the couch.

April 13, 2003 1:47 PM

kristine said:

Well man, I'm really not sure. You might check your server error log from the control panel and see if it shows any failures to do with mt-tb.cgi. I know that I've seen some posts on the forums about people linking to larger files (maybe the Pet feature???) gets trackback stuck when trying to autodiscover. How long is your timeout set to in mt.cfg? (look for PingTimeout) I'm not sure if that makes a difference, again its probably only for sending pings, but its another thought....

April 13, 2003 3:09 PM

milbertus said:

Kristine - yeah, that's basically what I was talking about. The only difference is that it's for a category archive page, not an individual archive page. There's only a small difference in the SQL used to pull down the Trackback ID.

Lisa - I think the problem is that AutoDiscovery doesn't work with category pages. When you were testing this out, you were using the URL of one of your categories, right? And it wasn't pinging anyone - probably because AutoDiscovery doesn't check to see if it's a link to a Trackback-enabled category, only if it's to a Trackback-enabled entry.

This might be worth pointing out on the forums as a bug, because it with AutoDiscovery on, it really should pick up Category Trackbacks.

April 13, 2003 3:17 PM

Lisa said:

The timeout is set to 30 seconds.

Kristine: you get pinged when people blog your link (and Pic Yourself), right?

I can make IDs if either of you want to look around at my blog setup.

April 13, 2003 3:56 PM

kristine said:

Yeah, all people have to do is enter in http://kadyellebee.com/ as a URL in their post and it pings me if they have auto-discovery on. Same for PY. I just compared the source of our index pages and they look the same.
Did you get the ping I sent the second time I saved my newest post?

April 13, 2003 4:37 PM

Lisa said:

I did get the second ping

April 13, 2003 4:38 PM

kristine said:

Well, that's a good sign. At least the ping URL is working. I'm running out of ideas, though. I'm set this up on all of my major sites and not had a problem. I'll keep thinking about it; maybe something will come to me in the middle of the night