The latest version of MovableType (version 2.2) has been released by the dynamic duo of Ben and Mena Trott and its a dandy. An intruiging new feature has been added called TrackBack. From MovableType's documentation:
Movable Type's TrackBack system allows peer-to-peer communication and conversations between blogs. Imagine that you write about a movie you just saw in an entry on your Movable Type-powered blog. Another MT blogger reads your entry, and wants to write an entry referencing your original post. He could just comment on your blog, but he'd like to keep the post in his own database and host it on his site.
TrackBack itself is a framework for peer-to-peer communication between weblogs; it can track cross-weblog discussions, it can provide remote content repositories, it can emulate guest authoring, etc. The technical side of TrackBack is very simple: when you want to notify a remote site of your existence, you send a ping to that site. The format of these pings (simple HTTP GET requests) is discussed [here]. In the Movable Type implementation of TrackBack, we've added password protection to category pings, IP banning, automatic RSS output, and email notification of new pings.
In other words: we want TrackBack to benefit, and to be useful to, more than just Movable Type users. We want to encourage integration of this feature into other weblog tools; that's why we have documented the ping format below and have tried to make the basic framework very simple. Feel free to email us (trackback@movabletype.org) if you have questions.
Looks like I won't be getting to bed early tonight! More to come.
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