Want to have a discussion with another blogger but keep your contributions to the discussion on your own blog? Well you can using trackbacks! Here's how it works ...

First you publish your new blog entry as usual and save it. Once your entry has been saved and you are still looking at the edit entry form then you scroll down a little to find a long textbox titled Trackback. Here is where you enter in the trackback url for the blog entry you want to notify. For Roller blogs the trackback url is typically found on the comments page right above where the comments are listed. Now copy that trackback url into the textbox on your edit entry page and click the "send trackback" button. Done! What you have now done is posted a comment on the other blog which contains a summary of your blog post as well as a link back to your blog. Schweet!

Here's a quick scenerio to hopefully describe how this can be fun. Let's say a friend of yours has just posted a new blog entry about a cool new feature of the Java programming language. You read the post and decide that you want to follow up with a post about your own set of cool discoveries, but of course you want it to be a continuation of your friends original post. Following the instructions above you can write your blog post as usual, then send a trackback to your friends blog so that his readers can see your comment and follow the link to your blog and read what you have to say. And of course the process can go on and on, back and forth, and include as many blogs as you like.

So give it a shot. Feel free to use this entry for testing if you like. The trackback url is ...

Also, thanks to Lance for correcting me on my previous remarks about Roller not being able to do trackbacks. I would say the functionality is a little hidden, but it is certainly there!