Serendipity Forums

Is any of trackback-supporting plugins able to let me customize the trackback text ?

Hi!

Mekk wrote:Is any of trackback-supporting plugins able to let me customize the trackback text ?

No, not currently. The tracbkac excerpt is always taken from your blog article. This is some kind of blogger convention, that trackbacks always contain your article next, and not some kind of custom summary. This is kind of a barrier to keep trackbacks "real".

Regards,
Garvin

I do not object this, but it is somewhat irritating, when the trackback text ends with half of the subchapter title, or so.... Also, it happens that I am referring to some other post deep in the text body, and unrelated introduction is put into trackback.

I am OK with restricting it to the quote of the text, but would be nice to mark which fragment should be used.

I am returning to this issue, because it turns out to be the main serendipity drawback in my case.

I just reviewed trackbacks which serendipity created between articles I wrote, and I found almost all of them to be just a crap.

Cutting the word after the first letter, ending trackback with the first word of unrelated paragraph, or joining a leading sentence, some heading (which has no final punctuation) and a few further words, etc are just very uneasthetical (and unreadable on the receiving site).

Even worse, the trackback text is frequently completely unrelated to the original article, and ununderstandable for the readers of it. The classical case: I am writing about something unrelated, then deep in the article I make a note and add a link. And trackback text contains this unrelated intro. It may be uneasy to find out why given trackback was created.

If this really can't be edited, then at the very least use the text containing the link. The current fashion seems to favor trackbacks like:

[...] All those criteria were described in Johnny Bonny blog post about vogging software. [...]

so taking a paragraph containing a link seems to be reasonably safe bet.

Hi!

I wouldn't mind adding the required code to the manual trackback plugin. After some more thinking, I also would accept a patch that introduced an input/textbox field to specify the whole trackback text.

If changes to support this would need to be added to the core of s9y, I would add the needed code there as well so be able to make the plugin execute that.

Any takers?

Regards,
Garvin