Open Posts, or Open Trackback Posts, and blogrolls of people wanting to play, are proliferating. But I've noticed something: some folks just can't (or won't) play "fair". Maybe it's a case of folks just not paying attention, or one or two (no! surely not in the blogosphere! heh) who are just too dim to understand the idea. In outline, it's simple enough, and Samantha Burns has a great FAQ for the Open Trackback Alliance that is more detailed than what I'm about to present, but, IMO, it's a "must read" for folks who wanna play the Open Trackbacks game. 
But in outline: - Bloggers who feel they have a post worth sharing around can edit that post to include a link to an "Open Post" on another blog. They then
- Trackback to that "Open Post" using their blogging software, a third party solution like Haloscan or Whizbang!'s Standalone Trackback Pinger.
- Lastly, and here's where the process seems to elude some folks, the Open Post MUST display the trackbacks ON THE BLOG'S FRONT PAGE, NOT ONLY ON THE BLOGPOST'S OWN SEPARATE PAGE. Several (and you know who you are, now, I hope) bloggers just don't have that little important detail in their heads. Don Surber's a real champ. He has a Blogspot blog that is NOT configured with Basil's Haloscan Hack, and so he dutifully brings 15 to 30 trackbacks from his Haloscan trackback page out "up front" daily. It's drudgery, I know cos I tried it-once-but shows Surber to be a real class act, IMO.
So, you folks who are link-whoring fake "Open Posts" without having the trackbacks show up on your front page, get with it, eh? :-) |
