Færslur laugardaginn 12. júlí 2003

At 17:47: PingBuddy vs. Simpletracks - and the History of the Trackback Form 

I stumbled upon Adam Kalsey's Simpletracks a couple of days ago. Simpletracks is a universal trackback form hack, very much like my own PingBuddy. Kalsey announced Simpletracks on June 14th, only two days after PingBuddy was born (link is in Icelandic). but it was originally only intended for the Icelandic blogoshpere. However, after I came across Simpletracks I went and created an English version that I now link to from my English weblog entries.

PingBuddy has one feature that Simpletracks doesn't have (yet, at least) to auto-fill the "Trackback Ping URL" field with the querystring of the requesting URL (click for example). This makes it dead easy for any old weblogger out there to point his/her readers to a prefilled-out trackback form for each weblog entry.

Today I also noticed that Shelley Powers (a.k.a. BurningBird) offers local Trackback forms for her own pages like I did (oops, Icelandic) before I went for the more generalized PingBuddy approach.

Other findings via Google:

• MovableBlog: Trackback Form PHP code sample - dated December 11th 2002
• Wizbang Standalone [Universal] Trackback Form - dated June 14th 2003 (Wizbang Tech's tag line is: "Explosively Unique Technology" which I think is kind of ironic for this paricular "technology". :-)
• Reedmaniac: [Universal] Trackback Form - not dated, but judging from the weblog archives, early in June 2003 seems like a good guess.
• D-log.net Manual Ping Form - dated March 12th 2003
• And without doubt a long list of others.

What I think is interesting is the fact that all these "small inventions" seem to have happened independantly of each other. Loads of people get the same idea and implement it for fun - to benefit themselves and others.

Googling for weblog history is fun...

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