Rodent Regatta

As I move down this edit box for Movable Type, I see title, category, entry body, extended entry, excerpt, post status, text formatting, URLs to ping…

Stop right there. Why do I have a URL in that URL’s to ping field? I didn’t put anything there. On the entry I wrote this morning, somehow, something got filled into that field and I cannot get rid of it. Every time I try to update or add to that entry, it pings this ”unwanted” site. Have I been hacked? Earlier there were two URLs there, but I seem to have deleted one of them.

If anyone knows what this is all about, I certainly would appreciate an explanation!

• * * UPDATE * * * I think I’ve figured this out. These pings are directed at the primary domain names for the people I had linked to. They are the normal Movable Type trackback pings. What threw me off was two-fold: first, the domain names were not the same as the names I thought I was linking to; second, I wasn’t aware that Trackback dropped those URL’s into my entry the way that it did.

Live and learn.