Whoops – Linkback Feedback

I inadvertently created a feedback loop where every blog post subscribed to via Planet Ciaran got an instant trackback/pingback as soon as it was posted. Here’s how:

1. Blog post is made and picked up via RSS/Atom by my Planet Venus (Sam Ruby’s reworking of Planet) installation
2. Excerpt of post gets added to Planet Ciaran
3. Feed2omb picks up the new post via Atom and posts it to the @planetciaran account on my StatusNet installation.
4. The StatusNet (formerly called Laconica, how long do I keep saying that?) Linkback plugin sends a trackback/pingback notification to the original blog
5. The blog adds an irritating and pointless trackback link to the original post.

Needless to say I’ve turned off the Linkback plugin until I can hack in a way to exclude that particular account. (Currently the plugin applies linkback logic globally, across the entire StatusNet installation.)

As a side issue, before anyone else asks why I bother with all the above anyway, there are two answers. One – because it’s there. Two, it provides useful ways of reading stuff. Planet Ciaran is subscribed to most of the stuff I read on a regular basis. The above setup gets me a) XMPP notifications, b) a web page to browse if I want to read it that way, and c) an aggregated sanitised Atom feed to subscribe to. If that doesn’t answer your question, and I suspect it probably doesn’t, then nothing will.