Sending trackback pings in Firedrop

[2004.02.14]

Since Firedrop is a client-based tool, it obviously cannot function as a trackback server. However, there's no reason why it cannot send trackback pings. So I implemented this feature the other day.

Using it is quite simple. In your Weblog ¹) , add the following variable to the entry that you want to send a trackback ping for:

trackback='trackback-url-here'

For example,

categories=['foo', 'bar']
insert_date='2004-02-14 23:14:47'
modified_date='2004-02-14 23:42:59'
trackback_sent='http://topicexchange.com/t/some_url/'
--
Title of blog post
...Body of blog post...

(URL mangled to protect the innocent...)

Firedrop does not send the ping when building; at that point, the blog post may not even be on the server yet. Rather, it sends it after (successfully) uploading. It checks all entries for the trackback variable, and if found, it attempts to send the trackback ping, then renames trackback to trackback_sent (so next time it won't ping the same URL again).

That's all. :-)

Firedrop uses Matt Croydon's tblib for sending the trackback.

¹) In theory, it works for other content types as well, but trackback are almost always used for weblogs. Therefore this feature has only been tested for Weblogs right now; for other types, it might or might not work.