Saturday, November 05, 2005

Asides, (Timerolls) and Pingrolls

Over on my other blog I just had call, within one post, to create another post containing an aside (i.e. self-contained footnote).

The process went as follows: as I was writing the first post, I created a second post, published it, got the persisitent URL and Trackback ping for that post and integrated them into the first post. Note that as a side-effect of the way I have set my blog up (the post date is when I created the post, not necessarily when I first published it*)

*here's another opportunity for an aside post, in partcular on what the correct time stamp for a blog post is? Created date? First saved timestamp? First published timestamp? Last published (e.g. following a reviosion) timestamp? Do we need timerolls (or editrolls) associated with each blog post, perhaps, delivering in the extreme case something like a MediaWiki page's History tab? Hmm - this use of roll sn't really ion keeping with the sense of the way it's used in blogroll, linkroll, or searchroll, through, is it?

I think a pingroll is, though - and this is another matter that arises from the way I use my other blog.

In particular, I've started included search links, rather than static links, on some occasions. For example, here's how I might refer to my writings in that blog on library toolbars. Note that I could also pull up a selection of links via a keyword search, category search or even a del.icio.us linkroll (I tend to bookmark and tag all my own postings...).

From this two things come to mind.

Firstly, a linkscript (scriptlink? That is, a Javascript include that will pull some content directly into a page) that will pull out all the links identified by the search, and perhaps include them as specific, unique but very generally labelled links (e.g. going through the list of links and including them in the page as: "here, here and here" for example).

Secondly, the need for a pingroll associated with the links that are pulled in. Now I don't know how sophisticated most blogging software is, but it would be nice if: 1) all pages came with an autodiscoverable Trackback/pingable URL; 2) all publishing systems polled all the links within a page, seeking out their ping IDs and sending a ping. (Can pings get retracted too, e.g by an unping?!)

Even if publishing systems were so enabled (with automated linkpingers(!)), the use of scriptlinks to pull in several links to a page using Javascript and perhaps the results from a call to a search engine may cause some problems. For example, if you just do a 'View Source' on a page that includes a scriptlink, all you'll see is reference to the script URL, rather than the code that the javascript causes to be displayed.

Unless, that is, you view source code using a tool like Jennifer Madden's View Rendered Source Firefox extension. Which is the sort of thing a linkpinger came with.

It might be interesting, though, if linkroll generators, however they're provided, also published pingrolls that mirrored the items referred to in a linkroll?

Del.icio.us tags:

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home