Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Anne van Kesteren: Sam catches that referrer, does some magic, and displays an excerpt of the post in his comments, along with a link and the title of the post that linked him. I believe he uses the feed that is linked from the referrer’s post for that. (Yes, I’m jealous and like this feature.)
Anne, If you have any questions, feel free to leave a comment here, and I’ll try to answer them. As to the referers “magic”, here’s an outline:
- Twice an hour, I scan my referers since the last scan. I also use the Technorati API to identify additional referers.
- For each unique referer, I fetch the page and look for autodiscovery links (max one per page)
- For each feed, I scan for entries with a content that links to one of my entries
- For each such entry, I grab the summary, link, and title.
- If no such link already exists from my referenced weblog entry to that refering link, I sanitize and truncate the summary and post it as a comment.
I do support a number of different versions of RSS, which essentially amounts to a number of different synonyms for the xml elements (example: description, content:encoded, xhtml:body). Those with only one such element gets that element treated as if it were both the summary and content.
People without autodiscovery don’t get linkbacks. People with not-well-formed feeds don’t get linkbacks. People with summary feeds or who strip out all html don’t get linkbacks.
The code is here. I also support pingback, and trackback is integrated with my comments. On my todo list is revisiting my email logic to reject more of the lame spammers.
Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Simon Willison : Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery - How Sam’s funky referral tracking works. I talked to Ping about a similar system at SxSW....Excerpt from HotLinks - Level 1 at
* People who have a per-entry comment feed as their first autodiscovery <link> cause recursion on Trackbacks
If you ever feel like stopping that, and I can improve my feeds somehow to help, let me know: that feed template is probably long overdue for a refactoring (dunno, I haven’t looked at it in forever).
Posted by Phil Ringnalda atPhil - if there is any way I can distinguish between a trackback and a post or a comment, I would be glad to add a line of code to my logic; even if it is specific to your weblog. I have precedent where I have done this for others.
As it stands now, it is pointless for me to delete the autogenerated excerpt as it will likely reappear in the next cycle. ;-)
Posted by Sam Ruby atHrm. I could make the permalink within my comments a <guid>, and the link of the pinging post the <link>, but if you ignore those then you don’t pick up linklog posts. Is there anything Atomic that would help us?
Bob Wyman’s right: aggregation is hard.
Posted by Phil Ringnalda atPhil: if the comment’s author was included in the feed, I could ignore any entry that was from me...
Posted by Sam Ruby at
So that's how he does it!
Sam Ruby reveals something that’s been puzzling me for a while: how he tracks referring pages without needing the likes of “Trackback"="http://www.movabletype.org/trackback/” or “Pingback"="http://www.hixie.ch/specs/pingback/pingback”. It turns out...Excerpt from Talideon.com Linklog at
Heh. “But I can’t put an rss:author in the feed, because that’s an email address, and I don’t know the email address for a ping!”
Okay, if I didn’t screw it up too badly (and thanks to you and Mark and Joseph for making the validator that kept me from having to think about both what it should say and how), the number one feed is an Atom feed with an author Person construct for the pinging bit-person’s name and url. For now, pending criticism, it’s a summary with the alternate link going to the pinger, since I couldn’t see why anyone would really want to see it in my comments (where the summary would, oddly, be content rather than summary).
Posted by Phil Ringnalda atSam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery
Sam Ruby outlines how his referer tracking system works.... [more]Trackback from Virtuelvis at
Okay, so now I’m interested into how we can find the full-post feed alternative to a page, when there are also comment feeds, category feeds and all that. Time for another microformat?
Posted by Mark Wubben at
Mark: I have a overall comment feed and a overall comment page. I have separate comment feeds for each html page. I don’t do categories, but Rael does: computers/internet/weblogs/blosxom html and rss
Posted by Sam Ruby at
Phil: excellent. I already had logic in place to handle such feeds, and so this morning I deleted the trackback echo from here and it hasn’t reappeared.
Meanwhile, I entries such as these will still be able to link back to comments found in your weblog.
Excellent!
Posted by Sam Ruby atSam, I realize now that the problem is pages where the discovered feeds are general feeds, instead of true alternative feeds. If I recall correctly Atom fixed that, right?
Posted by Mark Wubben at
Thanks for the write-up. It’s quite clear how it works now. I have to find some way to run a cronjob though or every time a user hits my site execute something from the command line (if possible) when it looks like a good referrer...
Posted by Anne at
links for 2005-05-09
Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery Sam describes his linkback system. (tags: blogs dev hacks) Suggested settings for the Canon EOS 20D From the pros at Sports Illustrated (tags: dslr Canon 20D config)...... [more]Trackback from Full Speed at
links for 2005-05-09
Sam Ruby: Sincerest Form Of Flattery Sam describes his linkback system. (tags: blogs dev hacks) Suggested settings for the Canon EOS 20D From the pros at Sports Illustrated (tags: dslr Canon 20D config)......Excerpt from Full Speed at
How Sam Ruby implements his referrer tracking
Sam Ruby explains how he does his referrer tracking. Note on “referrer” vs. “referer” usage. Only use “referer” to refer specifically to the HTTP “referer” header. Unless you’re literally talking about the...Excerpt from Keith's Weblog at
Greatest Hits Vol. 1, the Tinkery Bits
As you may have noticed, I’ve been shaking things up around here a little. Sorry for turbulence in the feeds! I’ve moved to a new server, and I’ve been trying out Movable Type again, but with mixed luck. Why? Because I’ve...Excerpt from 0xDECAFBAD at
I was wondering how you did that. Especially when I saw you trackback my linkblog that had to have been tracked via Technorati (which is how I discovered that you had done the trackback in the first place...) Talk about your possible recursion loops!
Posted by Bryan Price at