2008-03-19

Using Haloscan Trackbacks

Trackbacks are a very cool feature that allow bloggers to essentially reply to an original blog post with a new post of their own. Unfortunately, Blogger doesn't natively support trackback links or trackback pings yet, but there's a free third-party option through Haloscan. Unfortunately for those who prefer Blogger's built-in commenting system, Haloscan's automatic installation option replaces the comments with its own when installing its trackback feature. There are several links on how to get around this using 'old blogger', but after much fiddling it is also possible to do it on 'new blogger' as I've done on my other blog. What you need to do is get into your blogger dashboard and then click Layout next to your blog. Now click the Edit HTML option. At this point you should click on Download Full Template and save it somewhere safe so you can get it back if you screw it all up trying to follow my directions. Once you have it safely saved, click on the checkbox next to Expand Widget Templates and wait for the page to finish refreshing. At this point you want to search for something that looks like:

</head>

<body>
  <div id='outer-wrapper'>
Just above the </head> "tag", paste the following, replacing myhaloscanname with your Haloscan account name:
<!-- for haloscan trackback -->
<script src='http://www.haloscan.com/load/myhaloscanname'
 type='text/javascript' />
Now you want to scroll down and find (or use your browser's search/find feature to find):
<span class='post-comment-link'>
Immediately after the above, before any other tag begins (tags begin with those angle brackets), paste the following:

<a class='comment-link'
 expr:href='"http://www.haloscan.com/tb/myhaloscanname/"
 + data:post.id
 + "/"' expr:onclick='"HaloScanTB(" + "\""
 + data:post.id + "\"" + ");return false;"'>
<script
 type='text/javascript'>postCountTB(&#39;<data:post.id/>&#39;);</script></a>
Again, replace myhaloscanname above with your Haloscan user account name. If you paste it exactly there, exactly as shown above, and you're very lucky and have a similar template to the one I'm using, it should work just fine. You'll end up with a trackback link for each post, much like on my primary blog. See also: Good luck, and if you have any comments or suggestions, please leave them below.

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