When I started blogging, it was just a way for me to get a few thoughts down as they crossed my mind and a way to stay in touch with some friends while my life was overrun by babies. It was really intended to be a journal that others could read. To that end, I enabled the LJ links because the majority of those who I figured would be reading it were friends from the LJ community who specifically had me listed as a friend.
I don’t use Weblogs or Technorati or any other service to ping my posts when they get updated. I’ve thought about it, but in the end I realized that I wasn’t writing for others and I wasn’t really sure what the benefit was.
To that end, when I quote other sites, I haven’t been as dilligent about putting them into the pingback list. (Tech aside: this means they would be notified that I posted an item which referenced them as the original source). This takes a bit of extra time and manipulation, because I’d have to make sure that I went to each sites comment section, found the URL for the trackback and then added it to the list. For now, it was time I didn’t want to spend.
WordPress, however, has the ability to auto-pingback. I’m not sure how accurate it is, but supposedly it can notify any site you link to in a news post that you reference them — in essence saving me a step. I enabled it, but haven’t thought more about it.
Imagine my surprise then, when I saw a comment in my post concerning Peter S. Beagle the other day from Connor Cochran, Peter’s business manager. This is my first real comment from outside my own friends community. Somehow this guy found out I made a post about the issue and took the time to come here and read about it. In fact, he mentions my wedding, so I *know* that this wasn’t just a spam bot. I can only guess that a trackback got linked back and he found it out be searching somehow. I dunno. I’m just amazed. That shows the true power of the blogosphere and how once you post something, it’s out of your control. Who knows who in turn linked back to me and vice versa. I’m glad he stopped by.
His comment mentions that the site on how to help Peter was going to be updated on October 6th. That’s today. So I’m going to mention it again.
You can’t hide, can you?
;D
That is cool
Hi!
Big “oops” on the 6th. I didn’t account in advance for a business meeting with a game company on Peter’s behalf taking four hours instead of one, or the two-hour call I unexpectedly got from one of Granada Media’s in-house legal people — I think the public clamor is beginning to get noticed. (Mind you, they didn’t budge an inch in terms of position, but I now know even more about how ridiculous the arguments for their position are.)
So I’m working my tail off to get the updated site stuff up today, the 7th, and praying for no more interruptions (unless they are good ones).
— Connor