Trackback atcha
I'm not fond of reading all the rules before launching into something new. I'd much rather get a general sense of how things are and then figure out the details as I go along. I think this attitude comes from rebelling against my Dad's way of doing things. We'd get a new board game, for example, and have to sit waiting, waiting, waiting while he read--often out loud in his bedtime storybook "let's get you to sleep as fast as possible" voice--every blinking point of play.

So, when I started this site a few weeks ago, I knew nothing more about blogs than the fact that I wanted one and that I wanted it to be at least as useful and interesting as The Standard. Blogger was amenable to an "up and running in minutes" approach, and Hamster Salad was unleashed upon the world.

Once I've put something in motion, however, I do like to know the rules of the game. I'm a bit of a researchophile, so I've been spending some time recently bookmarking blogs and articles about blogging. Trackbacks emerged, in my mind, as the monopoly money, with potential for real money, of the blogging game. More importantly, trackbacks can add credibility to your blog as the number of relevant trackbacks to it increase.

Learning about Trackbacks
When I first encountered them, I thought trackbacks were the same as links to a specific page on a blog. They are that and more. For those of you even lower on the blogging curve than I, trackbacks automatically tell the original blog that you have linked to it and that blog then posts a title, summary, and trackback to your post. It's a quick and easy way of getting traffic to your site.

There are some concerns about this, such as trackback spam, in which the purpose of setting the trackback is not so much to indicate a relevant expansion of the original topic but to advertise your own site or services. If you want an informative introduction to this and other aspects of trackbacks, I suggest that you have a look at the videos that Jim Edwards (of I Gotta Tell You) and Thomas Pierce (of How to Blog for Fun and Profit) produced. The series of three short videos (8 to 10 minutes each) are a clear and informative start to advanced blogging.

After watching the first video, I learned that Blogger, which is what I used to set up Hamster Salad, does not have trackback capability, but that Haloscan is a free add-on (beta) that inserts the trackback function into your template. Within 15 minutes of watching the video, I had signed up at Haloscan and had trackbacks for all of my posts. Easy-schmeazy.

Now we'll see how well I've learned about adding trackbacks as this is my first post that attempts to follow those rules.

EDITED about 30 minutes later: Okay, something I didn't understand--I have to go back to Haloscan to manually ping the posts I want to trackback. I thought that that functionality would be automatically added to my Blogger blog, but apparently not. I had used Edwards' and Pierce's trackbacks as links in the above paragraph and that got me (and you) nowhere.
- posted by Sandra Smith @ 2:49 PM