- It wasn't used
- It wasn't perfect
- It was annoying
First reason is that it simply wasn't used. Although I think that trackback is a cool idea in principle, in practice, it has a long way to go because the number of tools out there that support it is simply too few. I tried to make it easier for people, but since most of my readers (and therefore, most people who would link to me) are LJ users, pinging doesn't happen. There's too much work involved, and the people posting simply don't see a return. In addition to that, Technorati does all the work of trackback without any of the effort, making it largely redundant.
It didn't work perfectly. I used a mathematical function to calculate the entry number and send it to a wordpress post, but that for some reason didn't work on some older posts. More importantly, it required me to keep the two sources in sync, something I was doing manually because I couldn't get the wordpress->lj working and was too lazy to figure out why. In addition, because of the limitations that LJ has on text - comment text, for example, is stripped - including the RDF to have auto detection was not how it should be, and I didn't test it to even make sure it worked. So, it just was hacky and ugly and a mess.
It was annoying to have the longer text, as well as to try and make people click the links, which they never did anyway. It was annoying to have it there and have people not know what it was. It was annoying to have the text that wasn't used taking up space.
With technorati playing the same role as trackback, and trackback really being useless in general, I'm dumping it. If you want to ping me, use the wordpress (http://crschmidt.net/wordpress). Otherwise, just comment and let me know. That's easier most of the time anyway.
Sad that trackback didn't work. I wonder if it can be reused for other things that could use it more effectively.
