Still working through some website changes. After a few weeks of playing with trackbacks, im not really convinced they’re particularly useful. Besides trying to spend time explaining how trackbacks work to people, I found these two articles that really sum it up nicely:

[Daring Fireball] And so while Six Apart calls TrackBack a notification protocol, the way people really use it is as a connection protocol. Person A sends a TrackBack ping to B to say that a post on A’s web site is related to a post on B’s web site. Assuming B does something with this TrackBack info, there is now a connection between A and B. But there already exists a mechanism for establishing connections between web sites: links. And there are ways to track links that are much simpler than TrackBack.

[Random Bytes] I shouldn’t be explaining what “Trackbacks” and “RSS” mean to every single new customer we get. But currently, I have to.

So how I am going to keep track of who’s linking to what, especially after eliminating comments?

First: I’m going to add a link to the site referrers, much in the same way that John Gruber and Brent Simmons have. No trackbacks. No pings. Just hit the site, and the reference will show up. John sums it up best: “Which brings me to my main point: TrackBack is unnecessary as a connector between web sites. We already have something to connect web sites: the link. When links are followed, we can track referrers. But even before links are followed, it is possible to analyze and track links between web pages, by examining the pages’ source code and extracting the links.“

Second: I’m going to add a deeper relation between the website and FlexWiki for comments. I still need to work out the details on this.

Anyways, these are a few of my current thoughts on it. We’ll see if I actually find the time to do them.