Through Technorati I found a post where Roland Tanglao referenced my post on trackback being dead. There was a discussion in comments about Technorati opening up Watchlists and API queries.
Hmmm.
I then created a watchlist of my base URL, http://weblog.burningbird.net, which you can access directly with this URL. This returns an RSS feed of the watchlist for the entire weblog — a watchlist being all links to my weblog on any specific day.
I took my old Backtrack application, which used to backtrack trackbacks and print out who else has trackbacked a specific post, and modified it to consume the RSS that Technorati provides, instead. I then posted a link to this at the top of my sidebar, and you can also check it out here.
If you want to do the same, create a watchlist for your weblog, copy the source code for Backtrack, and then modify the look and feel to match whatever you want. You’ll want to leave the PHP bits in the body alone, except to replace my watchlist URL with your own.
This will give you a list of links to your weblog, tracked by Technorati, on a daily basis. The question remains, though, how this alternative to trackbacks will scale, because Technorati is a centralized service, and one that can get sloggy at times.
Update: to add Technorati and Bloglines links to your posts
I’ve added Technorati and Bloglines links to each of my posts.
For WordPress, the Technorati link is:
<a href=”http://www.technorati.com/cosmos/search.html?rank=fresh&url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>” >Technorati Links</a>
If you’re not using WordPress, you’ll need to replace the function call to print out the permalink with whatever your tool supports. Just see what the tool uses for your permalink and copy this into the placeholder of the Technorati link.
For Bloglines citations (thanks to Dare for pointing this out):
<a href=”http://www.bloglines.com/citations?url=<?php echo get_permalink() ?>&submit=Search” >Bloglines Citation</a>
Again, replace the WordPress permalink function call for whatever your tool uses.
These will return the links, in Technorati or in Bloglines, for a specific post. Now, Bloglines was just bought out by Ask Jeeves, so who knows how long this functionality will last. And I’m sure someone somewhere is about to buy out Technorati, so ditto. But might as well make use of the functionality for now.
