MT Hack: More Detailed Trackback Notifications

Here is a hack born out of necessity.

Since one of the coolest things I get to do each week is read the Monday Missions, I rely on comment and trackback notification e-mails to alert me to new postings.

One of the things I didn't like about trackback notifications was that the e-mail header was so generic. It always looked like:

"[PromoGuy dot Net] New TrackBack Ping"

Well hell! That doesn't tell me a thing! I wanted to know what entry was being "pinged" and what site it was from.

So, that is why I developed this simple hack:

Just go to
yourMTDirectory/lib/MT/App

And open up Trackback.pm (be sure to make a backup).

Look for this line (#202 in MT 2.21):

'[' . $blog->name . '] New TrackBack Ping' );

And replace it with this line:

'New TrackBack on [' . $entry->title . '] from [' . $ping->blog_name . ']' );

Your Trackback e-mail notification will now look something like this:

New TrackBack on [My Mouth Is Doing the Happy Dance] from [PromoGuy dot Net]

MUCH BETTER!!! Of course, you may customize the message any way you would like.

If you would like to customize the message, here is what I did. In Trackback.pm, go down one line and look for:

MT::Mail->send(\%head, <<BODY);

Just under that line, I changed this:

A new TrackBack ping has been sent to your blog, on the $what.

IP Address: @{[ $ping->ip ]}
URL: @{[ $ping->source_url ]}
Ping Title: @{[ $ping->title ]}
Weblog: @{[ $ping->blog_name ]}

to this:

@{[ $ping->blog_name ]} has just sent a new TrackBack ping on $what.

URL: @{[ $ping->source_url ]}
IP Address: @{[ $ping->ip ]}
Ping Title: @{[ $ping->title ]}

So my message would look like this:

PromoGuy dot Net has just sent a new TrackBack ping on entry 1388 (My
Mouth Is Doing the Happy Dance).

URL: http://www.promoguy.net/archives/001395.php
IP Address: 55.555.55.5
Ping Title: Chill Jill

Pretty much the same, just a little more descriptive and moved around a bit.

Hope you find it useful!

file this under Blog Tweaks
Posted by on August 26, 2002 @ August 26, 2002 09:37 AM    
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