For those of you are are snickering at how this blogger didn’t really understand trackback, a basic feature of blogging, just picture for a moment the all-too-common occurrence of four PhDs struggling at the lecture podium to get the A/V program to work for an esteemed guest speaker.

Well, I’ve got me one of them thar PhDs. However, a PhD is also supposed to give you license for “life-long learning,” not that you really need a PhD to do so, of course.

Example: I try to do my best to cite interesting things I see in the blogosphere, especially those posts from my brilliant and witty friends outside of the ScienceBlogs corral.

But I could never figure how the trackback feature works – ya know down below where folks’ blog posts say something like “Blogs that reference this post.” You’d think that simply hyperlinking to someone’s post would be good enough these days. But my citations never seem to make it to people’s trackback sections for that particular post.

But, you would be wrong.

My Learning Moment: I just came across a fabulous, step-by-step example of how to use trackbacks by the blogger, Michael Pusateri, who writes Cruftbox, about the not-so-funny example of a friend’s post on his vasectomy. Unfortunately, Michael did not post this on his blog – it’s just a separate webpage – so I can’t practice trackbacks for this page. However, Michael does have a very short post from 2003, back when most of us were still in the blogging uterus, that refers to this page; hence, I shall practice trackback presently.

The bottom line, from Cruft (the legendary, Michael Pusateri):

1) The purpose of TrackBack is to let a site know that you are referencing them on your on site.
2) The TrackBack URL is different than the regular permanent link URL.
3) TrackBacks are fun. You should use them.