What Is A TrackBack?

I have been seeing TrackBack on a lot of blogs lately.

Today I couldn’t take it any more and I decided I had to figure out
What the heck is TrackBack?

So I turn to Google and this is what I come up with…

TrackBack provides a method of notification between websites.

If you put something on your blog and it relates to someone else’s blog you can send them a TrackBack instead of leaving a comment.  The TrackBack will automatically be picked up by their software and listed as a comment.  

TrackBack works on the following types of sites:

Movable Type
Bloxsom
Blojsom
Nucleus
B2
Radio
TrackBack standalone Tool

I checked a couple different software packages and it looks like the way to do this is to:

• Find a blog that accepts trackbacks


• Go back to your blog


• Work your way through a couple menus


• Enter a post on your site


• Enter the text you want in your trackback


• Enter the url of the site you want the trackback to go to – you got that while you were at the other blog right?


• Attach all this to your post

I am guessing the reason you don’t see more trackbacks around is that this looks to be about 5 times more difficult than just leaving a comment on the persons site while your looking at it.

If you don’t use one of the above mentioned packages for your blog then it looked like there are ways to do this but there is a good chance that it’s a lot more complicated.

And TrackBacks are all ready more complicated than I really want to mess with so I think I am done with them for the time being.