Sillybean

Comments and Trackbacks

In Chapter 3, you set your preferences regarding comments and trackbacks. Here, you can override those settings for the current post. If you’re editing an existing post that has comments, you’ll see the comments listed, and you can edit them right from this screen.

Figure 4-16. A trackback and a comment on a post

Trackbacks are automated notifications (pings) from other sites that have mentioned your post. They let you (and your readers) know that there are conversations taking place elsewhere about something you wrote. Trackbacks are usually displayed alongside comments on a post (see Figure 4-16). Here on the Edit screen, you’ll see a list of any trackbacks your post has received.

In the Trackbacks box, you’ll be able to ping sites about your post. Keep in mind the list of sites you chose to ping for all your posts in the Update Services section of your Writing Settings. Also, if you chose on that screen to ping linked sites, any links included in your post will be pinged automatically. If you want to ping any sites in addition to your Update Services list and the sites linked in your post, you can add the URL in the Trackback section, as shown in Figure 4-17. If your post has already been published, this box will display a list of the sites that have already been pinged.

Figure 4-17. Sending additional trackbacks from the Edit Post screen