(There is no location data available for this day.)
- Movable Type is watching me…
I decided the people and places footnotes at Pepys' Diary needed space for annotations, just like the diary entries have. Some of the Victorian footnotes are less than useful. Previously, those pages were constructed using PHP, but I had the idea of using a second Movable Type weblog to store them. Then, each footnote could have its own comments and trackbacks. After I got my head round using MT as a content management tool for entries that aren't date-based, it was nice and easy.
Once the new pages were live, I just had to change the links in the first diary entry to point to the new MT-generated footnotes. As that entry rebuilt I realised it was pinging each of the pages it was linked to… my brain clicked slowly… each footnote page would now have a trackback link to this diary entry… this would happen every time I linked to a footnote from a diary entry. Now, thanks to Moveable Type and its auto-trackback mechanism, every item in the footnotes would automatically list links to the entries in which the item appears! This was something I'd thought of doing when first developing the site and gave up as too much manual labour. I'm stunned that something so incredibly useful has happened almost accidentally. Now I'm understanding why trackback is useful, and I'm in awe.
It's going to get, hm, interesting after a few thousand entries and trackbacks, but we'll see how it goes…
In Movable Type, Pepys' Diary on 28 December 2002. 7 comments. Permalink