Trackback Problems with Windows Live Spaces
I can’t believe I wasted so much time on this, but I truly believe blogs hosted on Windows Live Spaces can’t do trackbacks properly. Why do I think so? Let me show you.
Before we begin our ride, let’s first look through the official trackback specifications and review how trackbacks really work. Got it? Good.
According to the official specifications, all I need to do to do a trackback is to send a HTTP POST to the trackback URL, with a mandatory url parameter, and a few other optional parameters (blog_name, excerpt and title). Something like this, if I want to trackback to my last blog entry:
http://armchairtheorist.com/2008/04/29/lotus-notes-sucks-outlook-sucks-everything-sucks/trackback/
Content-Type: application/x-www-form-urlencoded; charset=utf-8
title=Hello&url=http://www.myblog.com/hello&excerpt=Hello&blog_name=My+Blog
Easy right? Luckily this is so easy to test with a tool like cURL. So say I try the following command:
And hey, it works! What I get back this:
<response>
<error>0</error>
</response>
So Wordpress handles it like a champ. How about Windows Live Spaces? Let’s try my friend Guppy’s latest blog entry:
This is what I get back:
<response>
<error>1</error>
<message>Unknown Error</message>
</response>
Unknown Error… well that’s not very helpful. OK, maybe Guppy forgot to change the Windows Live Spaces setting to Allow trackbacks from any public website to my blog? But it’s 3am in the morning, I don’t want to wake him up for my silly little experiment…
Fine, I’ll register my own Windows Live Spaces blog.
So after leaving all settings as default and making sure I changed the trackback setting above, I tried the following command again:
Crap. I don’t believe this. Again, the response shows an error:
<response>
<error>1</error>
<message>Unknown Error</message>
</response>
OK fine, at least Windows Live Spaces blogs should be able to trackback the other direction to Wordpress right? After fiddling for an hour… no such luck either. Neither direction works as far as trackbacks are concerned.
Unless I’m missing something (and do leave me a comment to let me know if I did), trackbacks just don’t work in Windows Live Spaces blogs. Period.
That’s too bad, because this is an example where Microsoft has committed to supporting a certain standard specification, but they actually fail to do so, due to poor implementation or other factors.
Is anyone really surprised though? Remember Visual J++, or something more recent, like OOXML?
Hey man nice blog, just wanted to show some love