Trackback & Pingback Works!

An unexpected bonus for moving WordPress to GoDaddy.com.

As I reported in several entries of my blog (“Trackback Test,” “Trackback Tutorial,” “Trackback Troubleshooting,” and “Another Trackback Test“) I was never able to get WordPress’s TrackBack and Pingback features to work correctly on my server-installed blog. I know I was using the feature correctly because I followed any instructions I found and I did get it to work on the test WordPress.com blog Miraz and I used while writing our WordPress book. I searched and researched the WordPress Codex for troubleshooting assistance.

In the end, I just gave up. The features weren’t vital to me, although it certainly would be nice if they worked as they should.

Then, the other day, I moved my WordPress blogs (or most of them, anyway) to GoDaddy.com.

I noticed immediately that my automatic backups (done with WP-Cron and WordPress Database Backup by Scott Merrill) began working again. They’d stopped working when the size of my database passed the 1 MB mark and the Codex suggested fixes for that never helped — probably because I know as much about PHP as I do about nuclear physics. Now, all of a sudden, my aneclecticmind.com backups were being delivered automatically by e-mail, along with those for my smaller blogs. Cool.

I also noticed that the weird management problem I was having with XD Forum by Kris Bailey went away. I could now see and delete any forum I needed to — not just the few that happened to show up on the administration pages.

But last night, I noticed that the Pingback feature was working. How do I know this? Because pingback comments started appearing for my posts. And, oddly enough, they were all pingbacks that originated from one of my sites.

Here’s how it works. I write a WordPress post that includes a link to another blog entry anywhere in the blogosphere. My WordPress server is supposed to “ping” that other blog to let them know I’ve linked to them. If that blog is set up to receive pings, a “comment” appears in that blog with a link back to the source article. Trackback works much the same way, but it requires that you enter the link’s URL in the Trackback box when composing a post. Since that feature never worked right for me, I simply don’t use it. There’s really no reason to use it, when Pingback does the same thing with no effort.

The reason I know it just started working is because I started getting my own Pingback comments. You see, many of my posts reference other posts on this site. This creates a Pingback for the linked post. All those Pingbacks were hiding in a drawer or something until I switched to GoDaddy.com. Then they suddenly came out and went to work. The result: Several dozen new Pingback comments on my site.

The good news about this is that the links I made to other sites have also been delivered. That’s nice because it lets other bloggers know that I’m linking to them.

So right now, I’m a pretty happy camper. Not only did I get reliable and affordable hosting for my blogs, but WordPress works better than it ever did on my server.

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