Octopodial Chrome

The National Review has a great article about how Bush has really been a spendthrift. Subtitle: Bush spends like Carter and panders like Clinton. Sadly, it's true. I've been thinking that neither Bush I nor II was all that great, save in comparison to their opponents. Bush I gave us Souter and a tax hike; Bush II gives us more wasted social spending than Clinton!

This article about the cancellation of a promising intelligence-gathering method has been retracted.

CNN reports that another purported tape of Hussein has been released, this one commenting on the loss of his sons and grand-son. I find it amusing how loony-islamist the guy gets over time. For someone who started out as a great secularist, the armed might of the United States and her allies sure has put the fear of God back into him.

This was a right bear, let me tell you. They don't make it at all easy, although part of the pain may have been due to a less-than-clear idea of what I was trying to attempt.

What's TrackBack?

Essentially, it's a way for you to know who has linked back to you. When someone links to you, he also sends a small message (a TrackBack ping) to a CGI running on your host. You can then use various plugins to retrieve information about linkages. It all sounds pretty simple.

Steps to Install & Configure

TrackBack

You need to download the TrackBack standalone implementation from Movable Type. Note that although Movable Type is not free software, but the standalone TrackBack implementation is (released under the Artistic License). Unpack it somewhere, then edit tb.cgi. I set each of the paths to a full path, but that's not really necessary, I believe. Make sure that both $DataDir and $RSSDir are writable by whichever user or group the CGI runs as (apache:apache with Apache/RedHat Linux 9). Also make sure that you set the password to something complex—you'll need it to delete TrackBacks.

Now copy tb.cgi, footer.txt and header.txt into some CGI directory. I had already defined http://latakia.dyndns.org/bloxsom/ as a CGI directory, so I slapped them in there, and created tb_data & tb_rss there as well. You're all set up on the TrackBack side; now it's time to get Blosxom working with it as well.

Blosxom

This one's fairly simple, actually—what got me was that the docs were inaccurate. Find story.$flavour (e.g. story.html). You're going to put this somewhere sensible therein (I put it just after the title, before the body):

<!--
  <rdf:RDF xmlns:rdf="http://www.w3.org/1999/02/22-rdf-syntax-ns#"
              xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"
              xmlns:trackback="http://madskills.com/public/xml/rss/module/trackback/">
    <rdf:Description rdf:about="$url$path/$fn.$flavour"
                        dc:title="$title"
                        dc:identifier="$url$path/$fn.$flavour" />
    trackback:ping="http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi/$path/$fn"
  </rdf:RDF>
-->

To be honest, I don't believe that trackback:ping item really does aught, but it's part of what the docs say to do, and I'm superstitious.

You might also wish to download & install trackback_counts_display, which lets you refer to the number of TrackBacks with a simple $trackback_counts_display::trackback somewhere in story.$flavour. If you wish to be XHTML-valid, you'll need to replace $trackback_url?__mode=list&tb_id=$trackback_id with $trackback_url?__mode=list;tb_id=$trackback_id.

Sending a Ping

So, how do you send your own TrackBack pings? Easy enough—just go to http://yourserver.com/cgi-bin/tb.cgi?__mode=send_form, fill out the form and submit. The TrackBack URL is not the URL of the page, or the permalink, or aught of that sort, but rather the URL known by the TrackBack server, e.g. http://latakia.dyndns.org/blosxom/tb.cgi/comp_trackback. It's not actually a valid URL to reference, which is somewhat interesting.

Anyway, that's all there is to setting up TrackBacks & blosxom.