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I never really got into The West Wing until well into the penultimate series, so I have lots to keep me entertained if I feel withdrawal now that it's all over.

But there's one thing I can't help wondering...if Jed Bartlett's great grandfather's great grandfather - you know, the one that attended the Second Continental Congress at Philadelphia at which the Declaration if Independence was made - would ever have envisaged such a bloated institution striding the world with all the trappings of the deity they wanted to keep it separate from as the modern US Government.

Though this is not a techno-blog, I do do a fair amount of work behind the scenes myself in php, css and html to get it looking like it does (not a winner I notice!). But one thing has bugged me for some time...

The observant amongst you may have noticed that it is developed using the Drupal content management system. This has lots of add-on modules contributed by nice people all over the world. One of these is supposed to process "trackbacks". You'll have seen these on others' blogs - where if someone on another site posts something about a story you've written, you get a magical little line saying "Such and such a site or blog refers to this post".

Well with the Drupal trackback module this only appear to work if people have explicitly "pinged" the trackback URL for the post of mine they are referring to. And nowadays it seems that very few people actually do this. When I post on my blog it does ping each site I've linked to in the posting, I think (it certainly does at least the first site I refer to) without me having to explicitly tell it to.

So others see when I have referred to them and can put a link back in to my blog if they want. But I don't see automatically when they do, so they don't get a link back to their post underneath mine. But I know I am being linked to - I've been mentioned in the Lib Dem Voice "Golden Dozen" a few times, and in the Brit Blog Round-up and so on.

The trackback module claims to be able to discover a site that is referring to mine just from someone clicking on the link in another blog's article that refers to a post of mine. But it doesn't appear to work. So, while you've all been to conference, I've been trying my hand at rewriting that module to enable my blog to discover when someone refers to my blog just from click-throughs. And that's why I've been "blogging lite" this week.

I've not actually got very far yet. Just setting up a debugging environment took long enough. And now that I sit down to think about how to do it, I find it much harder than I first thought. I can see why the module authors have not implemented it yet! For example - how do I distinguish between a referrer that is a search engine results page, a "real" article that refers to me, or just a "blogroll" type link in a sidebar. Incidentally - I notice that Lib Dem Voice picks up these sidebar links, as I've seen my pages listed as referring to some of their articles when actually they seem to have picked up the feed from the Lib Dem Blogs aggregator I put in my sidebar.

However, if you've stumbled on this because you are also looking for this feature in the Drupal Trackback module, you might be interested in having a look at the logic I think I have finally settled on in the following specification to achieve this:

Note: I am going to do this as a Drupal cron job in the trackback module using entries in the Drupal access_log database table. This is because the processing of each one to check whether it is a real "referral" or a search engine page or a link outside an article like a blogroll will take a little processing time for each page load if I do it when each page is requested by a user agent. So I guess I'm doing something similar to what Technorati does when it indexes your site when it has received a ping. Except it won't be triggered by a ping, but a referrer record in the access_log table. So here's the logic in crude "pseudo code".

1. START processing:
2. When cron runs,
3. For each row in the access_log table that accesses a Drupal node and has a referrer URL since the last time cron ran
4. Try to fetch an RSS type feed url from the referrer site.
5. If the site doesn't provide a feed url, then it's likely it's not a blog or news type site and we can stop processing.
6. If it does provide a feed url, fetch the feed and parse it.
7. For each article in that feed check whether it contains a reference to the Drupal node referred to in the access_log record.
8. If it does not contain a reference to said Drupal node we can stop processing.
9. If it does, extract an excerpt and title from the article in the feed and save the whole lot into the trackbacks_received table. It should then appear under the node on my site when it is viewed.
10. STOP processing.

As a slight aside, I'm wondering how to check comments on others' posts as well. I'm not quite clear whether all types of feed have a way of discovering the comment feed, if one is available, for each article in the main feed. If so it can probably be done.

There seems to be a spate of group self-abuse going on with excitement at the prospects of a general election. I do not share this excitement. Indeed I look upon the prospect with dread and depression. I'm a democrat, right? So I should welcome the chance for the people to have their say, right? Wrong.

I'm with Winston when he said:

No!
Originally uploaded by Mig_R

"Look at all the power [Mr Attlee] is enjoying today. No Government in time of peace has ever had such arbitrary power over the lives and actions of the British people, and no Government has ever failed more completely to meet their daily practical needs. Yet the right hon. Gentleman and his colleagues are avid for more power."

Nobody currently vying for Mr Attlee's job today even remotely proposes sufficiently to reduce what Churchill went on to call "this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, [which] is a violation of democracy."

No!
Originally uploaded by Will...

The stakes are abhorrently high. That you and your coterie of friends and sycophants should have control over the better part of half of the entire nation's income. And with it the power to condone or more frequently condemn the personal choices of millions - more, probably, than lived under the Pax Augusta in Rome's entire empire.

I want a revolution. A revolution of devolution. I want power, the vast majority of it at least, held by people I can go and meet at my local civic centre. If there is anything that needs a joint decision between two or more civic centres let them agree on it mutually, and if, in the very last resort, something that has to be dealt with at a national level, let them send representatives to argue the case on an ad hoc basis if possible but with a minimum of permanent representatives - just enough to give every civic centre a voice - if necessary.

No! Not even you!
Originally uploaded by Ming Campbell

And I want to be able to elect some of them every year so that if they are not doing a good job we can make our views plain on a sort of a "1 year moving average" basis to which they will necessarily have to react by forming and reforming their power sharing agreements to reflect the true will of the electors.

I find it repugnant that anyone believes they are so much greater than any of the rest of us that they believe they can run the country and our lives better than the Almighty gave us the free will to do for ourselves. They should humble themselves to recall again what Churchill said:

"Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

We seem to be at the last roundabout on the road to Serfdom (probably courtesy of some new town super-planner). We must decide to go right round it and head back the way we came.

Coincidentally, overnight I've been pointed to this article by a fellow Georgist, Fred Folvary, on a similar issue on the other side of the pond.

Yazz: