Trackback problems, Wordpress not doing pings
November 3rd, 2006 by Stefan JuhlYesterday I discovered that wordpress for some reasons didn’t do my trackback pings anymore. When I started this blog not long ago it did work, so I wondered about what could’ve gone wrong.
The first thing I did was to check the database. In the posts table I found that wordpress had stopped doing the trackback pings after my fourth post. I did a bit of searching and found this post where I learned that I could just execute the ‘/wp-admin/execute-pings.php’ scripts. The script did all the trackbacks which hadn’t been sent. But the script also returned two PHP errors saying that it couldn’t do the pings to ‘http://’. Apparently wordpress had registered some invalid url’s to trackback, and then got stuck on them.
Do you know for sure that your trackbacks work? If not, I’d recommend you to check the ‘posts’ table in your database. See if the trackbacks for you recent posts are listed in the ‘to_ping’ field or the ‘pinged’ field. If they’re listed in ‘to_ping’ and none are listed in ‘pinged’ then you should probably try to run the ‘/wp-admin/execute-pings.php’ script. If that doesn’t fix the problem you could try to clean the ‘to_ping’ field for the first post from where the trackbacks hasn’t been done. Then run execute-pings.php once again. Do this until the trackbacks for your most recent post has been sent.
Also check this fix which should make sure that the ‘to_ping’ field is clean etc. I haven’t tested it since but the code seems like it should do the job.
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Posted in Blogging |
November 4th, 2006 at 4:41 am
Unfortunately, wordpress has lots of little weird problems that are hard to track down.
It is, however, a very nice content management system and is pretty powerful. Having the source to muck with is kinda nice too
G-Man
November 4th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Hey G-man! Nice that you’ve started a blog. I’ve read your posts at seomoz once in a while.
And yeah, even though wordpress occasionally acts a bit weird and has some strange problems, it’s still a neat system.
I’ve found that many of my new non-blog sites can be based on wordpress by just adding a bit of creativity for the customization. This has proved to be pretty efficient since it only takes little time to set up and customize it for my needs.
November 5th, 2006 at 8:58 am
WordPress’ Pingback/Trackback Issue…
Trackbacks isn’t something new in the blogosphere. It was originally implemented with Movable Type. Other blogging tools followed (TypePad, BoastMachine, Nuclues) including the blog engine used in this site (WordPress). But what really is a track…
November 6th, 2006 at 12:49 pm
Finally, I can see that my trackbacks are working! Thanks, Stefan!
November 11th, 2006 at 2:02 pm
Hey Poldo, I’m glad you benefited from this.