Whenever I send trackbacks from Wordpress, I always get the comment in the receiving blog looking something like

Trendyblog >> Blog Archives >> March >> Post Title
[...] because the result of these activities tends towards a feeling of [...]

the point that example is making is that it adds absolutely no useful information to the discussion, other than a link, and an incomprehensible, seemingly-randomly-selected blurb of text.

I’ve even tried filling in the exerpt field, and it doesn’t actually use it, it still sends a snippit that’s nonsensical.

Maybe I’ll get around to modifying Wordpress’ code to use the exerpt field, but I don’t think I should have to do that — it should follow some logical behavior in the first place.

From a user point of view: Nobody understands it. One of the questions I get constantly is what is Trackback? And I get this questions from both new and veteran bloggers.

But thats not to say your way isn’t good, too.

I’d write a server-side query where it writes to a DIV which is already positioned where it should be on the screen, with the actual queries at the very end of code’s execution, with errors supressed by the @ operator.

That way, if the queries failed, they’d not generate messages, and the bulk of the page would have already been pushed out to the client anyway.

There’s no need for Javascript at all.

XMLRPC queries would suffice.