As I mentioned in my post the other day, Trackback lacking the venacular, I am putting some effort into using TrackBack to see how / if it might be enjoyable.

Besides cleaning up the trackback listing page for this blog, I created an HTML form that, for any one of my blog posts, reformats the post so that I can easily send a trackback ping to another site.

This form is created in blojsom, the engine that runs this blog. But, there is a nice little bit of JavaScript with the form that would come in handy if you were wanting to create a similar form in another blog engine.

The essential source of the form is available here if you would like to use it or look at it (view source for the goodies). You might notice that this is templated using Velocity.

The way I have integrated this form into my blog is that I have assigned this template to a new blojsom flavor. In the blojsom configuration, this is done simply as follows (say, the new flavor is called "tbform" and the template is called tbform.vm):

In the blojsom flavor.properties, add:

tbform=tbform.vm, text/html;charset=UTF-8

To access and use this form, go to any permalink on your blog and add to the URL: &flavor=tbform (Note: on this blog, the URLs work a little differently, so changing my URLs like this won't work. If you want to see exactly how this looks on my blog, send me a message and I will send you a URL you can look at.)

From there, in the form, you can enter the URL of the site to which you want to send a trackback ping, and you can also paste in an excerpt of your blog entry to send along as well. Your blog name, and your blog post's title and URL are filled out in the form automatically.

This is all a bit crude and semi-manual, but it is a big help compared with composing trackback ping URLs totally by hand! Leave me a comment, or trackback to this entry, if you use this or have any suggested modifications, etc.