The title of the famous books, the 'Dummies' moniker, is your first clue: This whole big broken industry has been so effective in concealing the Man Behind the Curtain, that I lose track of the number of people I have to tell, "It's not you who's stupid, it's the technology designers." Not intentionally, mind you, it's just that engineers are very often more interested in how something works and what it does, and they only rarely ask how people will actually use it.

Yet another case in point is this short item on JOHO where the indubitably brilliant self@evident aligns in befuddlement with the incisive Docster. "Trackback Wha'? tells in 4 lines how a simple thing like tallying websites which cite your post gets twisted into an impossible set of Easy Assembly Instructions.
This post, by my posting it, will, hopefully, illustrate to the JOHO crew that they are not only most certainly not dummies, but are in fact insightful cryptologists capable of breaking the Trackback design engineer's dark gnostic code.

This particular problem will go away with time. Ben and Mena were unusually swift in implementing the Creative Commons license code and it's only a matter of time before TrackBack is no more than an option in the setup options. Being in a business selling this product, it's in their interest to make these kinds of things easy for their buyers, and while many dot-coms miss that point, the Trotts are pretty good listeners. Still, as you can see by the lack of numbers after the TB footnotes on all the moveable type websites, as much as it's a good idea, there's apparently a high wall around the Trackback garden.

The trouble is in the interaction. JOHO has enabled the option on their menus, uploaded the CGI scripts and the mt-check lists no problems, yet mt-tb returns a server error that would frighten a jet pilot. It's at that point an otherwise comprehensible mental model of how the service works is blown apart, the curtain drawn back and the person left with no foot hold.

People still want to interact with their machine, but they just don't know how because the interaction cues have vanished, it's a void, a pit, and there's no door out, BSOD. If the operator is guilty of anything, its not stupidity, it's human curiosity, it's because they went exploring and opened an unlocked door that the programmer-guardian never checked. Their 'fault' is only their lack of clairvoyance.

btw, this post didn't register on Joho: He's maybe missing some Perl module, or has two that conflict, or has server permissions that don't match, or ...