Currently one of the limitations of using the otherwise great comments service Disqus is that it doesn’t allow you to display trackbacks/pingbacks.  Apparently this will be fixed in a future release of the Disqus WordPress plugin, but for now it’s not working.

The trackbacks you receive are still stored locally in your database, despite them not being displayed, so you can access them. However there isn’t a built-in way to access just the list of trackbacks. Trackbacks are stored as comments in the wp_comments table and are identified by a comment_type of either ‘trackback‘ or ‘pingback‘. (For our purposes here, there’s no real difference between the two. For more info on what the actual difference is, see this page) So, if you wanted to you could write up a bit of PHP that pulled all the trackbacks out of the database & displayed them on your blog, but for a lot of people this is a bit much.

If you look on this page (the FriendFeed Comments Plugin page), you can see a list of the trackbacks that page has received. It’s a very simple list, I’m not displaying the text snippet that usually comes with trackbacks, but that’s just personal preference. If you’d like to be able to display your trackbacks without having to worry about writing code yourself I’ve got a really simple plugin that lets you do this here. The plugin adds 2 functions, get_approved_trackbacks & trackbacks_template.  get_approved_trackbacks takes the post id as an argument and returns a list of the trackbacks that have been approved (moderated) for that post. trackbacks_template is essentially an additional template tag to be used in the same way as comments_template() is used on the single.php template file.

So for example, if you wanted to display the trackbacks before the comments, download & install the plugin. Then open up the single.php template file for your site & find the line <?php comments_template(); ?>. Stick <?php trackbacks_template(); ?> on the line above it. This will display the trackbacks as an unordered list inside a div with the id "trackbackslist" with a h3 heading "Trackbacks" above the list. However if you’d like to style it differently, it will also look for a template file called trackbacks.php in your template folder. If it finds that it will use that to render the trackbacks.  This is what I’m doing here so as to not display the trackback text.  By default the plugin will display that too.

Obviously this is an advanced option, and only for those familiar with HTML & PHP.  For those people, the plugin provides a variable called $trackbacks which is an array of comment objects. The code that I’ve used to display the trackbacks by default is contained in a file called ‘trackbacks.php’ in the plugin folder, which you can copy into your template folder to use as a starting point for styling your own list.

Hopefully Disqus will sort out what it’s going to do with trackbacks, according to Daniel from Disqus it’s coming soon.  I’m pretty happy with their service, they’ve been really responsive to any support requests and they’ve had pretty solid uptime.  The lack of trackbacks isn’t really a big deal to me, but I do like to show who’s discussing my posts. As usual please leave comments / bug reports on the plugin’s page.

One of my mates got a new mac & the other day I was having a play around with it. It is sweet.  The UI is out & out gorgeous, no question. It’s intuitive too, I really haven’t used a mac since I was in high school, but it all just worked.  The photo application using the built-in web cam was a lot of fun & the Time Capsule app is really nice (plus its interface, like everything else, is just plain fun).

The new iPhone looks to be much of the same, beautiful design, easy to use software and, soon to be available, lots of third party apps to install.  The ability to sync with Exchange looks to be a really good feature, this puts it in direct competition with the Blackberry.   The new iPhone will finally get 3G networking support too.  A lot of people wondered why this wasn’t in the original iPhone, but none the less it will have it now.  It’ doesn’t have video recording or video calling facilities, and while some may wonder why, I don’t see this as a problem.  Video calling was the original major selling point of the 3G network, but it really hasn’t taken off.  I’ve got a 3G phone & I’ve only ever made a single video call – when I first got it to test it out – but it’s just not feasible to use normally.

This brings me to my point.  The new iPhone will run on the 3G network, but it won’t have MMS or video facilities.  Have a look at the features page, it ain’t there.  It will take photos, and you can email them or sync them with the new MobileMe service, but you can’t directly send them to other mobile phones with MMS.  It’s certainly not a big deal, but this is such a simple feature I’m really not sure why it would be left out.  It seems like Apple doesn’t want it’s users to know that there are other 3G phones out there, it’s the walled garden all over again.

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Mozilla has released the second Release Candidate for Firefox 3, if you had RC1 installed it would have come as an automatic update, otherwise you can get it from the download page.  The release notes for RC2 are here. 

There aren’t any new features, this is a pure bugfix release. Ironically though, there are more ‘known issues’ in RC2 than there were in RC1 (21 vs 17). 

The final for Firefox 3 is due later this month I believe.

No question for me that Windows Live Writer is the best product to come out of Microsoft’s Live project/platform/whatever. The Writer Zone blog announced today that there’s a new release available.  It’s a CTP (Community Technology Preview), not a stable release because they’ve added a bunch of new SDK plugin stuff along with the updates to Live Writer itself.

Steve Hodson has a great post outlining all the new features in the application, there’s heaps of great stuff in there, including some little things like recognising what lighbox plugin you’ve got installed on your blog & allowing you to set the images to use this.  The Auto Linking features is also cool, an automatic glossary.  Download the installer here.

One of the main issues that some people have been having with the FriendFeed Comments Plugin is that sometimes, seemingly randomly, it will fail to match up a post with the information from FriendFeed.  There are a couple of reasons why this does happen, but the problems all centre around the fact that I have to use the post title to match up the details because there’s no other uniquely identifiable piece of information available.

This is of course a problem when people edit the title, either due to a typo or a editorial change.  Also there seems to be some string encoding issues, especially around the 32,000 different characters that can render to look like an apostrophe.    I’ve spent quite a lot of time trying to strip out the special characters and normalise the titles so I can be sure of getting a match between what’s on the blog & what’s coming back from the FriendFeed API.  I even tried just stripping out non-alphanumeric characters, but then I had a complaint from an amazingly patient person who’s site was using Cyrillic.  So what I’ve got now is a rather hodgepodge solution where it tries to strip out as many characters as possible, then does an md5 hash on that to use as the id, and some people are still having issues where, for no apparent reason, the posts won’t match up.

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I was listening to the L33t Tech Podcast and they mentioned that Twitter developer Alex Paine said that one of the things that’s causing all the stability problems for them is that Twitter was never designed as a communications platform where people would have back & forth conversations, it was meant to be a CMS.  Robert Scoble then said that the Twitter developers assumed that everyone would just answer their question “What are you doing?” 

But now with the @replies and #hashtags people are using it for all sorts of different things.  People are using it as  a bookmarking service, a todo list and geo-locator and so on.  Full-on conversations happen on Twitter. And although it may not be the best platform for it, once a conversation gets going, it tends to have its own momentum. Sure sometimes you can say “lets take this over to FriendFeed” or “lets go onto IM”, but if it’s a conversation where people have passionate opinions, that probably isn’t going to happen.  People aren’t going to stop and think first.  Usually.

Facebook ran into this same issue over the little word ‘is’.  Originally all Facebook status messages started with ‘is’, as in ‘Glenn is wasting time on Facebook instead of working” (Anyone from the office reading this, that was just an example, really).  They expected people to use it for the same purpose as twitter, as a ‘what are you doing/thinking right now’.  But of course, people didn’t want to just do that, they wanted to be able to say other things, maybe things not directly about them, or maybe in a different tense.  So you ended up with this weird Facebook-grammar like ‘Glenn is wow it’s really hot today’ (see this group for a good list of them), or you had to twist what you were going to say into something about you right now.  So really, Facebook was slowly molding you into a narcissist.

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