If it’s not one thing it’s another… All the Encyclopedia pages have a section at the bottom that shows when that person, building, or whatever is mentioned in the diary. These links are generated automatically by Movable Type’s TrackBack facility. It’s been a bit flaky at times but has mostly worked.
However, like annotations, TrackBacks are susceptible to spammers. Although Movable Type does a good job of filtering the spam from the real requests for links, the spammers still try. Every time they “ping” the TrackBack script it causes a little bit of work for the web server.
Recently the script received more than 20,000 hits in a single hour, causing the computer that my websites share with other peoples’ websites to slow to a crawl. Understandably, the company that runs the web server disabled the TrackBack script. It’s probably best if I leave it that way for good.
I’ll try to find time to write some code to keep the Encyclopedia references up to date, but for a while I’m afraid they won’t be updating. Sorry!
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