recursion

I was surprised to learn that Movable Type does not rebuild individual archives after receiving a TrackBack ping. The reason for this is that Movable Type processes the ping before sending a response. MT rebuilds as few pages as possible so that the listener does not time out (this often happens anyway; there is a config setting you can change to increase the timeout).

This sucks for me because I'm using Simple Comments to integrate TrackBacks and comments into one list. After all, a TrackBack is just a comment left on someone else's site.

There are a couple solutions to this. Most involve PHP or SSI to include the dynamic list of TrackBacks on the individual entry page. I can't use that because my site is all static. Phil Ringalda hacked the MT source code to rebuild individual entries which makes upgrading a bitch.

The solution I am thinking of is using procmail and the MT-Rebuild script to rebuild the comments after a TrackBack. But that's a problem too, because I am not the only author on my site. However, I do write most of the entries, and I could do a cron'd rebuild to catch the rest.

The other thing -- and this would catch all the trackbacks with a slight delay -- would be to set up an RSS feed for TrackBacks and parse that XML to find the entries which need rebuilding.