The OG tags implemented by Jay doesn't seem to be working consistently when creating social media card

[choukden]

Dale have received A LOT of requests from Shirley to quickly create a social card for a blog post that I thought Twitter would have pulled the image for from the blog post. Either the images aren’t clear enough or they don’t show, or for some other reason.

Nothing for you or I to do now, but wanted to just bring your attention to it. I know it’s something I’ll need to wrestle with post-Discover and will probably need some help.

For information:
Testing social media card with Twitter and Linked inspector:
https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator
https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/

[choukden]

I have just tried the LinkedIn validator and Twitter validator with the first 8 blog posts from the blog page. For those blog posts with either a thumbnail image or an image in the post, the validators seem to work fine for both Twitter and LinkedIn, except for the post from John Lenihan: https://developer.hpe.com/blog/understanding-hpe-greenlake-identity-access-management/
This post has no Thumbnail image. The LinkedIn validator takes the 2nd image of the post (It does not take the first image because the first image was added using HTML code rather than via the CMS editor), Twitter validator does not render any image.

BTW, the blog post “How to create Docker credentials for GreenLake” (which I think refers to the post written by Jia Guoping, correct?) does not have a Thumbnail image nor an image in the post. Hence you cannot create a SoMe card from it.

Another example, the last post from Nathan (still in review - https://www.linkedin.com/post-inspector/inspect/https:%2F%2Fdeploy-preview-1239--hpe-dev-portal.netlify.app%2Fblog%2Fan-example-application-for-processing-stock-market-trade-data-on-the-mapr-converged-data-platform%2F), the LinkedIn inspector is able to render the first image whereas Twitter validator is not able to render any image, although there is a thumbnail image in the post. Once it will be published, we will check how the validator works (or not).

So, I think there might be some conditions that must be met for being able to build SoMe card out of the blog post with OGtag for both Twitter and LinkedIn:

• having a thumbnail image
• the post must be published
• if using the first image, the first image must be added using the CMS editor.

But I am not 100% sure these conditions are sufficient for the SoMe card generation works consistently.

Additional investigation are needed to come up with a general rules that works 100% of the time.

Denis

[Didier-Lalli]

My recommendation is to always have a thumbnail image, and we should state it clearly in the contributor's guide, explaining this is used to amplify on SoME.

Couldn't we simply make the field mandatory in the CMS?

[choukden]

The CMS Editor guide already includes recommendation about the Thumbnail image.
Agree with Didier to make the "Thumbnail image" attribute a mandatory attribute for blog posts.

[choukden]

Just as a matter of test, Dale provided me with two images for the recent published blog post:
https://developer.hpe.com/blog/service-mesh-security-hardening-%E2%80%93-using-spire-with-istio/

Thumbnail image size: 512 x 393 and 1200 x 675
The LinkedIn inspector and Twitter validator worked fine with the published blog post with either of the images.

So a small size or large size thumbnail image seems to be okay.