...more recent posts
Dual screen laptop (via /.)
There is no spoon notes that David Watson
[has come] to the rescue for Radio users who would like to add "autolinking" or automatic "backlinking" to their blogs. He's created a little webservice called "getReferers" that automatically generates a list of links to the sites who are linking to you. It then helpfully puts that list at the end of your page. Allowing your readers to see who is linking to you helps to put your comments in contextHe (she?) also mentions what's different about my implementation: "By the way, I think the way JimsLog handles this referer feature is the best I've seen because it indicates referers by post." Thanks. I don't know enough about how radio works, but if you can script with it on the level of apache environmental variables then it's pretty easy to have your backlink system only activate on requests for specific posts, rather than general links to your page (for me, in my system, this just means watching for a numeric query string - like ?4454 on the end of the REQUEST_URI - which will always be a link to a specific post.) I'd love it if radio got this feature.
A couple of lingering problems. I was sure I had the back link thing filtering out links back from the same page (I don't want it recording back links originating on my own page.) But this doesn't seem to be the case now. I'll get that sorted this week.
My friends from Montana arrive today. I'm very excited. The timing of everything is working out so well. I've been very busy finishing things, and now they arrive just as I am ready to pick my head up, switch gears, and take a long look around. I think Frank was here once before when I did that. In fact, I think that's what started me back into computers in the summer of '99. I wonder what's next.
David McCusker did mention me today, and now it seems that my last name is out. I guess I sort of like that. I wish I could be more revealing about my home life like he is. It's very interesting to read. If it was a book I would be staying up late to see what happens with Lisa and the Taekwondo studio. As this isn't the case MB and I stayed up late finishing Return of the King. This was her first time through. It's great to read out loud.
Finally put the new back end on the other site. Now, if I'm correct, I'm not going to build this project again (this is the third full revision.) I'm going to take a little break from scripting. And then I'm going to try a different project. I don't know what it is yet.
I'll still be here though.
David McCusker is taking note of back links as well (although not mine.) I hope this keeps getting talked about. I want more people to integrate this into their blogging software. Come on, it's not hard. Expose your referers! Now that we pretty much have ease of use in terms of publishing, this is the single largest enabler of the grand conversation.
I won't pretend I didn't have some hand in him noticing, but David Weinberger wrote a nice summary of my reference logging feature (which I should probably just call 'back links' since thats what other people working on similar things seem to be calling it.) Anyway, I am a huge fan of his so this makes me quite happy. Thanks.
Go buy his new book. That will probably make him happy.
We're buying our tickets to Montana right now. Yahoo!
John Udell has a piece on the Disenchanted link back (which is a lot like what I've been calling reference logging.) I wonder if they have automated it in the same basic way that I have? In any case, Udell seems to grasp why this might be very cool inside the blogging world.
Looks like decafbad has a very basic version of the same idea now too. As well as diveintomark. Cool. From what I can tell I'm the only one grabbing actual text off the referring pages. But that just might mean that mine won't scale.
What big bang?
This makes me happy since I've been dismissed off hand more than once for suggesting that the big bang is in no way "proven" to be the true story. In fact, if I understand correctly, it's almost entirely based on the red shift of very distant stars. But this could be caused by lots of things. Maybe the speed of light is getting faster.
(Interesting Shulgin article on this topic.)
While understanding that this truly reveals the amateurishness of my coding abilities, I've posted the PHP code for the reference logging feature I built. (No, this isn't useful in any real way - I'm just posting it in case someone was wondering how I did it. Maybe someone could get an idea from it. But it's too tied to the rest of my system for someone else to be able to use this fragment. Still, I'd like to see others implement their own versions of this feature.)
After a page is served from the database here, the system checks whether reference logging is turned on for that page. If so it includes the snippet of code linked above which determines if there was an external referer who had linked directly to a specific post here (a link to a URL you get when you click on any [link] link.) If so this bit of code gets the HTML of the external page, and parses it so that only the bit of text right around the link to us is left, and stores that text and link in the database here.
It's not pretty. But it does seem to work. I guess, like all of my stuff, it should probably be thought of as a proof of concept. Maybe some day a real coder could write a more elegant version. Still, I'm not sure that version would actually work any better.
I'm very interested to see people's reaction to this feature. This has been hard, so far, because it's not immediately clear what I'm up to. But the implications could be rather large. Especially in the weblog world. There are lots of conversations going on between pages, but no real way for someone unknown to break into the conversational loop. Or rather, the only way for someone unknown to break into the loop is to be pointed at by someone already in the loop. This leads to a certain level of cliquishness. But if all specific references to a page showed up as a link and a snippet of text on the page being linked to (well, actually on a sub page, but noted from the page itself) then new people could be introduced into conversations just by commenting on them.
This takes some power away from the individual author (in the sense that they aren't vetting every single link, some are just appearing.) So there could be resistence on that point. I wonder.