Kramer Experiments
I’ve been doing some work on the Kramer plugin over the last few days. Kramer is a WordPress plugin that queries Technorati to see if there are any sites linking to your entries that have not sent Trackbacks or Pingbacks. It sort of “fills the gap” for all those people who don’t or can’t send pings.
The extended functionality I’ve been working on checks incoming refs. When someone clicks a link to this site, their browser sends a ref, telling my site where they came from. Kramer has been logging these refs for several weeks, but not doing anything with them until now.
Now, refs are collected, filtered (to get rid of refs from search engines, webmail, feed reading sites, etc), and have Pingbacks sent on their behalf. The rules for filtering are rather complex. http://site.com/blogname/ will get ignored, but http://site.com/?p=34 won’t. Basically I’m trying to filter out front pages. Permalinks are what we really want.
So if a ref gets through the filter, I send a pingback to my own site on its behalf. This gets attached to the shutdown action, so it won’t slow the page load. My site then pings itself, and WordPress does its Pingback magic, checking the ref to see if it is really a valid link* and adding it as a Pingback if it is.
The filtering mechanism is hardly complete, so you may see a lot of improper sites get through… like search engines that don’t look like search engines when you look at the URI. So just bear with me. The Pingbacks will NOT send comment notifications, so you don’t need to worry about that.
*actually, while this is what is supposed to happen, I found out that in the non-release version of WordPress that I’m running, that functionality accidentally got dropped, so I had to add it back in.
