One of the inconveniences of Trackback is that it lengthens the process of blogging somewhat; first one blogs a permalink, then must follow up by entering one or more ping URL’s. This especially applies for those of us who are not able or willing to use MT bookmarklets. Trackback-enabled bloggers can help ease the process with these two minor template changes:

1. Add the ping URL to your main blog index, just like the “ping” link in the entry footer below. This way, a blogger linking to your entries need not go into the trackback window to see the ping URL. Here’s the pertinent MovableType template code, to place inside <MTEntries>:

<a href="<$MTEntryTrackbackLink$>">ping!</a>

2. For the benefit of those who are blogging right after viewing your received pings, also put a permalink to the blog entry in the trackback window. Movabletype’s default Trackback template already does that, so it shouldn’t be too much trouble.

(IMPORTANT: Always remember to add the entry anchor to your permalinks if you are using monthly or yearly or category-based archives! That way, following permalinks from blog posts and trackback windows will jump straight to the entry, rather than start from the top of the page.)

An anchored MT-template permalink should look like this, more or less:

<a href="<$MTEntryLink$>#<$MTEntryID pad="1"$>">permalink.</a>

(Update: Those of you who don’t use individual archives will need to apply this MT hack (as of 2.2.1) to get the hash marks of your anchor links to display in your Trackback pings. Otherwise, only a link to your archive file will come up, without an anchor. Thank you, Mr. Ringnalda.)

A hard disk crash took out the site two nights ago. The backups that were used to restore everything were three days old — and did not catch the mySQL db. I have a week-old dump of the db, and this copy of the blog.html include, so not all is lost. But right now, I need time. Time to focus on work, time to work on my relationship with *******, time to reinstall MovableType and get Trackback running, time to redesign my portfolio, time to tweak my interface. For now, a break.

UPDATE: I’ve reinstalled MT, restored the MySQL db from the old dump, and manually entered lost entries up to 12 July from cached files. Many comments, however, were regrettably lost, and I’m pretty sure there are other troublesome bugs lurking in the grass. For now, go sponsor The Dane or post to Christdot or Poke a Bunny or Amazoogle or something.