How to Put TrackBack on a Harvard Blog
A few people asked me how to do TrackBack last night. I couldn’t find a “how to” on it, so I’m creating my own.
There are two main things you need to do in order to add the TrackBack feature to your Harvard blog.
1) Turn the trackback feature on. Go into Prefs (in the editor’s menu–if it isn’t there, either you aren’t logged in or you don’t have the proper editorial privileges), then follow the link on the sidebar to TrackBack. Yes, you want TrackBack enabled. If you set it to ping automatically, then you don’t have to manually add URLs to ping in the box beneath news items being edited or created. The templates on those pages are for the appearance of the TrackBack box, which is the box you get when you click on a TrackBack link on a blog. You don’t need to edit those templates to get TrackBack to work.
2) Add the TrackBack macro to the code for your news items. You can edit the template for your news items by going into Prefs (in the editor’s menu–if it isn’t there, either you aren’t logged in or you don’t have the proper editorial privileges), then following the link on the sidebar to News Items. Move down the screen until you see a box labeled “News Item Template.” It contains the code for your news items. The trackback macro is {trackBackLink}. You need to put this macro somewhere into the code for your news items (including the brackets). If you want space around it, add space. There are two spaces separating my comment link from my trackback link. (There’s a list of macros that can be used in Manila. Macros must be enclosed in { } (squiggly brackets/curly braces found near the return key on some keyboards) in order to work.)
If you followed that correctly, TrackBack should work on your blog. A TrackBack link should appear in your news items–even old posts should have the link now. You can test the feature easily by linking one of your blog posts to another
You can add other macros, like {departmentLink}, to the “News Item Template” while you’re at it, too.
