<p>With this popular stuff called blogs, new posts are coming up every millisecond and <a href="http://alcidesfonseca.com/archives/2007/10">one</a> post gives birth to <a href="http://www.lmjabreu.com/176/son-of-what-is-google-up-to/">another</a> and by the end of the day you got a post about another post that comments yet another post that cites someone else in the blogosphere.</p>

<p>To connect this dots there were created <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linkback">linkbacks</a> that is basically a way of telling a post his has a new child. That I know of there are 3 kinds of linkbacks: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trackback">Trackback</a>, <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pingback">Pingback</a> and <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Refback">Refback</a>.</p>

<p>Pingback and Trackback are both notifications systems where the linking post tells the linked one &#8220;Hey, I am you son!&#8221; and Pingback is more secure because he does the <span class="caps">DNA</span> exam to be sure (he scans the linking post to see if it really has the link) so that prevents spam, a <a href="http://www.antseyeview.com/archives/001653.html">real issue</a> with Trackback.</p>

<p>As for Refback, it is the black sheep of the family since what he does is record the people who visit your posts and then guesses that they came from a post. They have to be really smart to do this, but generally they are worst than track or pingback, but don&#8217;t need some implementation of some awkward protocol.</p>

<p>While people who use Wordpress, Blogger, Movable Type and so on don&#8217;t need to worry about this since the software already has that installed, some really weird people that code their own weblog system (I&#8217;m referring to myself!) have to learn this stuff and if they want to notify people who they link to, they have to code it themselves.</p>

<p>So last night I did it! And now every time I post, I send both trackbacks and pingbacks to every link in the post, just to be sure. In order to accomplish this, I used <a href="http://www.postneo.com/2003/01/30/tblib-010-released">Matt Croydon&#8217;s</a> <a href="http://postneo.com/projects/tblib/">Trackback Library</a> and <a href="http://mathieu.fenniak.net/python-pingback-library/">Mathieu Fenniak&#146;s Pingback library</a> both in Python with some custom modifications by me to be more an automated process.</p>

<p>Now I can find the fathers of my posts, but I don&#8217;t know who my children are&#8230; I already started recording the referers, but from what I can see it&#8217;s kinda messy and I will probably implement pingbacks in a near future.</p>