I never really messed about with the trackback feature, but I was a bit suprised to learn that they aren’t reciprocal in nature. I had (wrongly) assumed that when someone does a trackback to one of your posts, you get a link on their blog/site back to you.
In fact, it seems that the responsibility is with the author of the post who is citing the trackback. If they don’t manually put a link into their text, it’s not going to exist. It’s a bit of a one-way street, and I’m a bit disappointed. I’m not so much disappointed in people who aren’t really aware of what’s going on with trackbacks – those that seldom or never use them like myself. But it’s kind of disappointing how the whole system was created. I mean, when you create a post and add a trackback, what you’re basically doing is having a link to your content automagically posted on someone else’s work. You’d expect the system to give credit where credit is do and create a reciprocal link “This post tracks back to <original_url>”. I don’t know – the whole thing as it stands seems a little bit selfish.
But just to practive what I preach, I’m including a trackback to Jonesy’s page where he links off of my article and talks about home networking and new uses for old junk.
And to add to that… today I robbed Peter to pay Paul – I took 128MB out of my main workstation and the HDD out of a now dead workstation to get that other Dell workstation running – a 433 MHz celeron.
