The occasional scrivener

Commenting redux

Updated

Well, as with many technical problems, the solutions present themselves after a night’s sleep.

There was no problem with the URL rewriting (I had simply disabled the writeback plugin previously, and neglected to enable it last night while testing). These are the steps I followed to enable trackbacks.

1. Install and configure the Blosxom Writeback plugin. There are clear instructions in the package.

2. Download the stand-alone Trackback implementation from Movable Type.

3. Copy the tb.cgi, header.txt and footer.txt to your cgi-bin directory.

4. Edit the tb.cgi file. I simply replaced the $Password variable with a good password.

5. Create the directories tb_data and tb_rss in the same directory. (To be wholly honest, I don’t need if these directories are needed.)

6. Enable the display of the trackback URI where you want it (check out the flavours included in the writeback package).

All done!

I’ve tested this a bit, and as far as I can tell, I don’t get a mail from wbnotify when a trackback is received. So something will be needed to keep track of what’s posted.

Original post

I was forced to disable comments a while back because spammers were making this blog into a cesspit — as they’re making blogs all over the planet as we speak.

I’ve been working with enabling comments or even better, enabling trackbacks. Trackbacks are not immune to spam, but I agree with oblios in that a weblog is a publication. By at least requiring the commenter to have access to a blog of their own, you raise the bar slightly.

All well and good, but unfortunately it seems that blosxom and trackbacks are compatible, not many people seem to have implemented them. In particular, I found very little info on the nitty-gritty of how to configure blosxom’s writeback plugin and the stand-alone trackback CGI. I found an additional wrinkle, too. I use Apache’s mod_rewrite to translate /cgi-bin/blosxom.cgi to /weblog/, and I think I need to hack writeback to reflect this.

All in all, a slightly frustrating experience. I love blosxom and like its philosophy, but the technological laizzes-faire model of decentralized plugin development can feel sub-optimal at times.

Updated on Tuesday, 2005-01-18. Posted at 12:29, in the scrivener category. Comments [0]
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