You can configure Telligent Evolution to alert the your community of new and updated content on your site by automatically alerting blog services and search engines when the content is published. Telligent Evolution provides two methods for doing this.
Pings
Telligent Evolution supports automatic blog pings to a configurable list of services. The list of services to send pings to is configurable at the site and blog level.
Out of the box, the application pings the following services whenever a blog post is created or updated:
- Pingomatic (ping-o-matic.com)
- Weblogs.com
- Technorati.com
Pingomatic resends the blog ping to over 20 other services. While Weblogs.com and Technorati.com are included in the list of sites that Pingomatic submits to, it is included in the default list of ping services for backup reasons. Occasionally any of the ping services can experience downtime, so it is good to have your blog software ping more than one service directly.
Ping services usually have a custom URL for automatic pings that differs from a site's home page. These URLs can often be found in the help or about page for each site.
Each individual weblog within Telligent Evolution can also have a customized list of services specifically for that blog. This can be useful for a blogging community with a large number of independent bloggers.
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Trackbacks
When a weblog post is created or updated, Telligent Evolution scans for any links within the body of the post. For each link, we then retrieve the page that was linked to and checks the source code of that page to determine whether the software that hosts it supports the trackback service. If it does, we send a trackback ping to that site to let it know that a post was published linking to it. This ping contains the title, link, and a brief excerpt of the post containing the link.
The other site determines whether and how the trackback request is processed and published. Depending on the link, the trackback request might be sent to the same blog (if linking to another post within the same blog), a blog on the same site, or a third-party site.
When a weblog post is displayed on a Telligent Evolution site, special trackback service information is embedded in the source code of the Web page. This lets other blogs find the blog’s trackback service URL. When a Telligent Evolution site receives a trackback request from another blog (or even the same blog), it takes a number of steps to verify that the trackback is valid before saving it to the database, including to retrieve the Web page supposedly linking to the blog post and to verify that it is publicly readable and actually does contain a link to the blog post. This helps prevent a spammer from sending false trackback requests to the blog. The trackback is also run through the same spam blocker engine that qualifies blog post comments before being saved to the database. If a trackback request is accepted and saved, it displays in the list of comments for a blog post.
The trackback properties are configured in the Control Panel, where you can configure blogs or individual posts to send and accept trackbacks.
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