RFC

Sun, 9 Feb 2003

My TrackBack links at the bottom of each post are not like everyone else's. I don't like having to highlight and copy a URL, so I made the URL into a link that people can just right-click and copy. I was chuffed with myself until I became aware of two problems with this setup:

  1. People with single-button mice (i.e. Mac users) can't right-click
  2. The fact that my setup is non-standard (especially for MT) means that at least two people have thought the link was broken, whereas it just wasn't meant to be clicked on that way.

I don't like the standard Javascript open-window thing, but I think the not-link is causing people too many problems. I'm trying a new thing, namely adding the TrackBack URL in plain-text under the entry. I won't rebuild the whole archives, so people can still compare with older entries. What do you all think? Which way should I do it? Do you have any better suggestions?

Comments

Aquarion says:

I'm sticking to my trackback links, which look cleaner. Single-buttoners may not be able to click, btw, but they can get a context menu with click-and-hold.

Laurabelle says:

Aquarion, I agree that the links are cleaner, and I may go back to that if I ever decide to hack into MT's code and change the error message to something more helpful, i.e. This isn't a real link, this is a TrackBack URL. Right-click and copy it to ping this entry. At the moment all people get is 1 Need a Source URL (url) in XML. Not tremendously helpful, even to someone who knows something about TrackBack and XML.

Kevin had a great idea to use something like OnClick="alert('[helpful message]');return false;" on the link to tell people what's going on, but unfortunately that applies on either right- or left-clicks. So no good solution yet.

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