thedanglingmodifier.co.uk

It turns out that I’m supposed to respond to the comments left on my blog. I wish I’d known about this when I started blogging. There was a time early on in the life of this blog that people did leave interesting comments about language and the way it is used. They don’t any more; probably because I didn’t respond. Now all I get is comments like this:

“Nice post you have here.”

I get really excited only to discover that it’s yet another one from “jndtoebgack” or I click the link and it takes me to a website in Cyrillic script.

I miss the comments that accused me of not knowing what a ‘grammatical imperative’ is. I never knew when I started this that there would be so much to learn about blogging.

So I turned to Wordpress, because if you don’t manage comments properly you can get into all sort of trouble: ‘Trojans’ on your pc for example.

Wordpress manage to give a clear explanation about comment spam, pingbacks and trackbacks in plain English. But I don’t understand it. For once, I do understand the words, but the ideas elude me.

The Wordpress site says that the originators of trackbacks, SixApart, have a good explanation of trackbacks and pingbacks. I decided to read it but it left me none the wiser.

“TrackBack uses a REST model, where requests are made through standard HTTP calls. To send a TrackBack ping, the client makes a standard HTTP request to the server, and receives a response in a simple XML format (see below for more details).”