Discovered that MT 3.2 allows for internal trackback pinging — i.e., if I make a post that points at another post within this same blog, it will issue and record a trackback ping, which earlier MT versions did not support.
While that tends to crowd the “recent trackbacks” listing, this is an incredibly powerful means of cross-linking posts within the blog. I.e., if I write post A about something, and then later write post B as a follow up that references back to A, then not only do I have that backwards link, but if I go to post B, I will automatically see the reference forward.
As it stood prior to turning this on, if I wanted A to know about B, I had to either manually edit or add a comment. Over a short lead time between posts, the temptation has always been to post comments and hope that folks saw that comments had been updated, vs. now actually creating all-new posts. This is much superior, because it offers the choice.
That’s pretty keen. Indeed, it’s keen to the point that, if I ever dropped trackback altogether, I’d do just external trackback blocking. As an internal device, it’s a real value. Indeed, I wish at this point there were a way to go through and save all the internal posts to force those historic trackbacks through at this point …