layout: post title: That old Trackback magic created: 1084123071 categories:

• Personal Publishing

A comment I posted on at flowdelic, a new blog by Mason Hale of frogdesign:

Actually, why do we need trackback? I very much agree with John Gruber's thoughts on trackback — Take your Trackbacks and Dangle and Trackback addenda.

I agree that a "threaded" or otherwise centralized view of the flow of conversation would be incredible. But I don't want to shut out non-trackback using tools. The referrer is common across all web-platforms — it's just links, after all!

That being said, for tools that don't do trackback, you can use Simpletracks from Kalsey Consulting. I use it on occasion, but other times I'll just do this — post comments on my site as well as type them into the comment box.

Some other thoughts: Is "trackback" capitalized or not? Is it a trademark of MovableType?