fettig.net

Wari sent me an e-mail this morning explaining trackbacks and pingbacks, the key distinction being that trackbacks are client-server and pingbacks are peer-to-peer between servers.  So Hep could support trackbacks, but not pingbacks.

Wari even outlined how trackbacks could work in Hep:

Trackbacks are very possible, all a user needs to do is to enter a trackback url somewhere somehow in a message (mail header works nice for mutt) and hep will try to ping the entry when an outgoing mail

is sent.  There’ll be variables you need, so after sending the blog entry through XMLRPC, you need to keep the blog ID, request it again for it’s full URL, then you can really send the trackback, but you must make sure that when sending, the main message must be stripped off HTML and be less than 255 characters.

This is, as we say in New England, wicked cool.  If (and this might be a big if) people are using the Trackback RSS module, the flow of information could work like this:

1. Hep fetches an RSS feed.  It parses the feed, and converts each entry into an e-mail message.  It also saves the messages, and some metadata (including the messages’ trackback URLs) in its cache.

2. Joe User gets the messages in his e-mail client.

3. One of the messages is particularly interesting to Joe, and he wants to blog about it.  So he hits "Reply".  Because this message came from Hep, the reply-to address is already set to "MyWeblog@hep", which is a special address that tells Hep to send the message to Joe’s weblog.  Joe’s e-mail client automatically inserts an "In-Reply-To" header, containing the ID of the message he’s replying to, into the outgoing message.

4. Joe sends the message.  Hep sees that it’s an "@hep" address, so it knows that instead of delivering it as a regular e-mail it should be posted to Joe’s weblog.  It also notices that the In-Reply-To header references a message that it has in its cache, so it looks up the trackback URL for that message.  Hep posts the message to Joe’s blog, and retrieves the URL for the newly-posted message.  Then it sends a trackback to the website where the original message was posted, notifying it that Joe has replied to the post at such-and-such a URL.

The result of all this is that Joe is able to have a publicly linked, blog-to-blog conversation, all from his e-mail client, without doing anything different than he would in having a regular e-mail conversation.

So, is anybody using the RSS Trackback module yet?

Update: Sam Ruby writes:

I am now. Generally I wait until somebody finds a compelling use case for a feature, and you certainly have a humdinger. I kinda suspect that this is the type of thing that Jon Udell would like to see. ;-)