I have “Trackback Auto-discovery” switched on for my blog. It was working fine in automatically pinging the weblogs I referred to. But it is not working any more. It does not even find the URLs to ping. Specifically it did not let me ping The Poor Man in the previous post.
Does anyone any ideas on what could be the problem?
UPDATE: It seems to be working now.
I think it worked. It’ show I got here.
It sounds like the trackback program is working, but it returned an error when you tried to ping Andrew.
The way trackback works is that your server sends out a ping to Andrew’s server. Andrew’s server sends back some information about the blog entry that you were pinging. It also rebuilds some of the pages on Andrew’s blog to show the new ping. If Andrew’s server takes too long in doing this, your server assumes that the ping failed. But Andrew’s server may have been able to eventually complete the ping process and it’s just that your server doesn’t know about it.
If a ping seems to have failed, go to the blog you were trying to ping and check to see if the ping shows up. If so, you don’t need to send it again.
Andrew: I did it manually later by entering all the trackback URLS in the “URLs to ping” text box.
A-M: There was nothing in the activity log and nothing in the pings already sent log for that entry.
The activity log I think generally shows the pings that are automatically sent, like to weblogs.com
I’m assuming that you got an error message after saving the entry and that’s how you knew that there was a problem.
I’m trying to explain why the ping can show up at Andrew’s blog even though your MT system thinks that it failed. This is how trackback and other pinging has been explained to me. MT is designed to stop waiting after a certain amount of time (you can set the time-out figure in mt.cfg) rather than waiting indefinitely. If it doesn’t receive a response before it times out, it returns an error. The other server (in this case Andrew’s) may have sent its response shortly after yours quit waiting.
When sending trackback pings, the most likely cause of failure is that the other server is taking too long to rebuild its pages to reflect the new ping, or it had an internal server error while doing so and did not finish rebuilding the pages or sending the response (this is usually due to a “reaper” program on the server killing the process for using too many resources). In the latter case, Andrew finds the ping, rebuilds that entry, and the ping shows up.
A-M: Thanks. It seems trackback did work for the global attitude post for CalPundit.
The problem with trackback is that it requires both your own server and also somebody else’s server to be working right for MT to think it was successful.
I’ve actually had trouble a couple of times pinging myself (across blogs) and you would think that ought to get through! If it doesn’t seem like the ping went through, I go to the other blog and check. If it shows up, then I don’t worry about it further.
One thing that helps, if you can stand the wait, is to increase the PingTimeOut from 15 sec to 30 sec in the cfg file.
My ping timeout is set to 60 seconds 😉