One of the things that bugs me is that I never seem to show up in things like the Technorati mini-cosmos that tracks who is linking to individual stories. Joi Ito and Boing Boing have that and even when I link to them, this blog never shows up in those lists. What should have been glaringly obvious to myself but wasn’t is that I use a plugin that is an outbound link tracker. This means that the URL in my story links is actually a link back to this blog with the outbound URL as a parameter to a CGI. Of course nothing can track that, it’s not a link to the article per se. Duh.
I hacked the clicktrack Blosxom plugin to now write out a standard link tag with the unmunged URL in it just prior to the clicktracked one. Because there is no text between the opening and closing of the link tag, it is effectively invisible to humans using browsers but should be recognized as a link by robots and other parsing mechanisms. Now we’ll see if this has the desired effect. I was really starting to feel left out of the party.
