Pingback confusion

If you receive one it will show just as a comment or trackback will. As for why you have not seen it work: Sorry can’t help since my move to 1.5 mine have not worked either.

To tell the truth I haven’t chased down the answer. With the ability to use trackbacks it becomes a redundant feature.

Pingbacks should show up as comments the same way as trackbacks do, is that what you are saying? If that is the case, pingbacks don’t work on my site either.

Mmm, still not 100% sure what this pingback thing is all about. Can anyone show me a site where pingbacks actually work and what they look like?

The difference is this:

If another blogger wants to let you know that he’s written an entry that is along the same lines as yours, s/he can manually put your trackback URI for that entry into their blog software before publishing the entry. Then, when their blog softwarte publishes the entry, the entry excerpt is sent to you.

Pingbacks work almost exactly the same way, but the other blogger doesn’t have to manually do anything before publishing his/her post. The mere act of putting a permalink URI from your site into his/her entry will cause their blog software to send the excerpt.

On your end I don’t think you can tell the difference whether another blogger has manually trackbacked you or their blogware has automatically done it for them.

Both trackback and pingback depend on BOTH blogger’s software being able to do their part in order for it to work.

Oh, yeah, and as far as I can tell pingback is broken in 1.5 but trackback works.

Ahh, thanks Heatsink – That was by far the most straight forward answer I’ve ever got on this matter. Now I finally understand the whole thing!

Btw, If I don’t provide an excerpt when posting (which I rarely do), does that mean that the pingback/trackback is canceled and no data is sent?

Ah nope. ping back works fine. the only thing that does not work on my blog is track back sends. everything recieves. That is the easy part, edit your comments.php. But track back will not send.

It seems that the pingback/trackback code is php implementation or server configuration dependant. I don’t see any other explanation for the variety ot situations where trackback in/out and pingback in/out work or don’t work for different people.

For example, brianbonner, in opposite to you – my outgoing trackback works just fine, but my incoming does not work at all. Same with pingback: outgoing seems to work, but incoming fails 100% of the time.

As I mentioned in another thread, I’ve moved to Haloscan for my incoming trackbacks which works flawlessly and I guess I’ll just have to live without pingback until it is fixed and works for everyone.

fredrik: Glad I could help. Many people (incorrectly) use the terms pingback and trackback interchangeably. While the end result on the pinged blog is generally the same, the process by which the ping ends up on that blog is different.

If I was going to meander for a bit, I would say that I think the future is pingback and it will eventually deprecate trackback. Pingback, in my opinion, is superior because it does not rely on a blog author to remember to tell their blogware to send a trackback when posting an entry. It’s all automatic.

Having said that, trackback isn’t even fully implemented in all blogware yet so I can’t imagine how long, if ever, pingback will become standard functionality.

Oh, I forgot your excertp question: I don’ t know if WP will automatically generate an excerpt for you or not. Why don’t you trackback to my latest Google entry (dated yesterday) at https://haloscan.com/tb/heatsink/117 without an excerpt and we’ll see what happens.

It doesn’t have to be a relevant trackback, I’ll just delete it once I see what it does and report here.

Well, that was simple. Obviously WP creates an excerpt for you if you don’t put one in. Good. That means I can keep ignoring that field when I’m posting ??

Thanks Heatsink.

Yeah? OK…

I don’t see anything from you on my site, but I’ll assume you tested it somewhere else…

If you say that WP auto inserts an excerpt, I wonder why there’s an AutoExcerpt plugin that I just stumbled across..?

Ahh…I see it now…

Yeah, that’s a very good question. Maybe WP 1.2 or earlier didn’t use to auto-create excerpts and the plugin you found is from that time?

Well, regardless if there is a plugin or not – it seemes excerpts are not a problem anymore.

Is there a way to log/debug the outgoing pingbacks? I know my WP (1.5) is tries to send them since it takes really long to save/publish the post, but I don’t see my post appearing as comment on any blog I link to, even though they’re all WP or MT based. I wonder how I can make sure if the pingbacks failed to be sent or if the other blogs just chose not to show my post in their comment section.

Hmm, I’m not sure of my assumption above any more. I turned off pingbacks by default, and it still takes more than 10 seconds to save a post. Maybe it’s the Markdown filter that needs so much time.