The Open Graph protocol for social media sharing.
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I'd recently started to notice that when I shared links to my Docusaurus blog on WhatsApp, the preview image was missing. I assumed it was a problem with my og:image tag, but it turns out it's a bug in WhatsApp's Open Graph handling caused by Docusaurus's newer, faster build pipeline, that minifies the HTML and strips the quotes from the og:image attribute. This post explains the problem and how to work around it.
We might also call this:
This is a follow up to my "How I ruined my SEO" post. That was about how my site stopped ranking in Google's search results around October 2022. This post is about how Growtika and I worked together to fix it.
As we'll see, the art of SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is a mysterious one. We made a number of changes that we believe helped. All told, my site spent about a year out in the cold - barely surfacing in search results. But in October 2023 it started ranking again. And it's been ranking ever since.
I put that down to the assistance rendered by Growtika. What was the nature of that assistance? I'll tell you. This post is a biggie; so buckle up!
I've wanted to take a look at some of the alternative JavaScript runtimes for a while. The thing that has held me back is npm compatibility. I want to be able to run my code in a runtime that isn't Node.js and still be able to use npm packages. I've been using ts-node for a long time now; it's what I reach for when I'm building any kind of console app. In this post I want to port a console app from ts-node to Bun and see how easy it is.
Image optimisation can be automated with the TinyPNG API. This post demonstrates how to do that.
In October 2022 traffic to my blog dropped like a stone. What happened? Somehow I ruined my SEO. Don't be me. I'll tell you what I got up to and hopefully you can avoid doing the same.
There's a follow up to this named "How we fixed my SEO" that you may enjoy.
The Open Graph protocol has become the standard mechanism for sharing rich content on the web. This post looks at what implementing Open Graph tags for sharable previews (often called social media previews) looks like, the tools you can use and also examines the different platform rendering issue.
