Updated the new help page for Open Graph card templates, which are rolling out in Micro.blog today. Plug-in developers can essentially design cards with HTML and CSS. Micro.blog then renderers them as static images.
@manton I see it now under Design. Awesome! Would it be possible to have ‘Title + summary’ use the text from the post ‘Summary’ feature, if there’s one?
@manton Stupid question maybe, but is the Open Graph basics plug-in needed if the theme has added support?
@manton But if someone wanted to make their own Open Graph card, and not necessarily use a theme’s version, could they install the plugin and customize on their own once installed?
@manton Also, I’m curious… I see the og:image is not generated right away on publish and seems to take a while to update on a post, which makes sense. Do you mind sharing how the image is generated?
@jim Yes, it publishes your blog post first, then generates the image, then re-publishes the post with the og:image tag. If a cross-post likely needs the image, e.g. Threads, it also tries to wait until it has generated before cross-posting. The image is rendered by processing the HTML template and running it through the wkhtmltoimage tool, which is based on an older version of WebKit.
@jim If you want to make your own card, check out this YouTube video I made. Basically you’ll just want to create a plug-in for yourself, or edit a custom theme.
@manton Thanks. Cool video and was helpful in the theme work I did. Should anyone ask, I’ll be sure to push them there. Appreciate all you’ve done and are doing for the platform.
@manton would you consider it normal for an image not to be generated, or the post updated, after almost three hours? Just curious. I know there’s probably a lot of tuning that still has to be done.
@jimmitchell Not normal. Anything more than a couple minutes sounds wrong. Can you send me a URL or other context that I can check? Thanks!