Sunday, October 16, 2005

Trackback for Military Bloggers

Michael Churchill runs a blog called Vote Churchill in 2006. He posted his Good Bye post on August 8th as he reported for duty in support of Operation Enduring Freedom. Marianne has been submitting posts on his behalf to let us know how he is doing and occasionally he has been able to forward something he has written for her to post on his blog.

He sent me an email today to let me know of his latest post "The Plame Game". I started thinking that there are probably a lot of bloggers out there who are in the same predicament as Michael: They can have someone post for them on occasion, but they really have no way to promote their work through link carnivals, trackback parties, etc. due to their present circumstances. It would be a shame for someone to be serving their country for all of us, only to have the blog they worked hard to create, suffer due to lack of promotion.

My suggestion is to trackback to carnivals, trackback parties, and open posts on their behalf.

Here's how it would work:

1. First of all, get permission from the host to do this.
2. Send a trackback just as you would for yourself only put in the information for their post.
3. Since the author of the post you are submitting will not be able to provide the courtesy link to the host on their own blog, offer to put the courtesy link on your blog instead. If you decide to post to the same carnival or open post, make sure you give them two return links instead of one.

Example: Thanks to (link to host's permalink) Open Post. Submitted on behalf of (author of post) .

Of course, there may be a better way to do this, but the idea, at least for me, is only a couple of hours old. The way I figure it is the operator of the carnival or open post simply wants a courtesy link to their post permalink and as long as they have a courtesy link for every post, it shouldn't matter what site it came from. Again, I may be wrong about this, but that's the way I see it. If you check with the host first then all the bases should be covered.

I know that bloggers are constantly looking for ways to give back something to those who serve their country and this could be a small way to give back. It's not hard and it doesn't take a lot of time, but I think it will let them know we still like their stuff and are willing to spread it around.
They'd do the same for you. Heck, they're doing a lot more than that now!

Update: I tried it out and it worked. Michael's post is now among the links in Stop the ACLU Open Trackback. Click the link below to go there. If you don't have Trackback ability on your blog you can get a free account at Haloscan or you can use Wizbang's Standalone Trackback Pinger.

Thanks to: Stop the ACLU Sunday Open Trackback on behalf of Michael Churchill.

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