I was worried (in eggyspeak “wiki” means “impossible to use”) but this is actually really cool and simple, and the MT trackback integration rocks! So I blogged it (http://www.geegaw.com/archives/0302.shtml#001100). Thanks Penguinix!

Heya, looks like a cool thing … but how does it work? (Sorry for my ignorance)

Basically, as far as I can tell, the web server at reversible.org is set up to do nothing but monitor click-throughs. When it gets a click-through to a certain page, it looks to see where the click-through was coming from, and if the page has some extra data on it (for example, if the linking page is a Movable Type blog) it can actually pull some additional information down(like the first few words of the blog entry in question).

If the page on reversible.org doesn’t exist yet, it kind of gets “created” in response to the first click-through (not strictly correct but I’m trying to fudge here to make the explanation as simple as possible). So people can make up a URL (e.g. “http://reversible.org/Ilike/Penguinix”) and if they put that URL on a web page and then click through the web page, they’ll see it listed on the newly created reversible.org page.

So what we see on the new “I like GNE” page is a list of where all the visitors to “I like GNE” came from (sort of like one of those free site tracking tools) which, in this case, is a list of all the bloggers who linked to Penguinix’s new URL. Thus now we have a list of blogs that like GNE…

does that make sense?