User Interface – it matters

Part of the wordpress.com functionality is that when you link to a blog from one of your own posts, wordpress attempts to automatically notify the owner of that blog by posting in their comments section with an excerpt from your post linking to them. This is called pingback.

Hey I just posted about myself

When this becomes a bit annoying is when you link to one of your own previous posts, as this also generates an entry (pingback) in the comments section of that post. Pingbacks from yourself look messy, and a bit unprofessional.

Rather than having to edit the comments on a previous post (especially annoying if you use an offline editor like Windows Live Writer to write posts) here is how to avoid generating the pingback.

Stop the internal pingbacks

User’s of the WordPress blogging package who arrange their own hosting (obtained from wordpress.org) can use several plugins which eliminate internal pingbacks, but those of us who let wordpress.com host for us for free can’t do this.

Our workaround is by using relative paths when linking to your previous post, which means omitting the domain from the link. To do this, instead of using the whole http://blogname.wordpress.com/year/month/day/posttitle/ link, just use /year/month/day/posttitle/ specifying the url.

Now that I think about it, this would be quite nice functionality for Windows Live Writer…

Update: The clever folks on the Writer Development Team have deflated my rush of blood to the head. RSS feeds apparently don’t like relative URLs – they cause all sorts of problems for them.