I’m working on my first Write.as articles. I can’t find answers to a few questions I have. I’m hoping y’all will be able to help me out.
Will updates to the signature component show changes on published articles, or only on new ones?
Can I manually designate the image to be used for OG data for each post, or is it always the first one to appear?
Is there way to add a “copy link” button to posts for easy sharing?
Is there way to automatically show a read time (such as “6 min read”) to posts (I found a post about this, but the code for the solution is now gone)?
I can’t use my own custom font using @font-face because of the CORS policy. Is there a way to get around this so I can use my own font in the custom CSS?
Is there an easy way to automate a list of featured articles that could be used on a pinned post? Or would that have to be done manually with custom descriptions, etc.?
Is there a complete list of CSS selectors somewhere that can be used for creating a custom theme?
Updating the signature will change it across all posts, including previously-published ones. Of course, for any posts that went out via email, subscribers will still see the old signature in their email inbox.
Besides setting your blog-wide social image, for now it’s always the first image in a post that will appear. Please feel free to write in Feature requests if you’d like to see more control over this! Maybe we can make it happen.
Shouldn’t be too hard with a little custom Javascript. Will need some time to get back to you on that.
That code should be online again!
There’s an old discussion about hosting a custom font on your own server to work around this: Font hosting? - #3 by plejer. Would something like that work?
Unfortunately there isn’t. The browser’s Developer Tools would be your best bet for now. But our CSS.horse tool might help – it lets you preview your custom theme in real-time. Then you can just copy your CSS from that tool into your blog’s Custom stylesheet field on Write.as and save the changes.
I can generate this. I just didn’t want to custom-build something if there was already a widget that I missed.
In theory this should work. I’ll give it a go.
Yeah, I can dig into the code and create my custom layer. I just thought perhaps you had a list of selectors for the key elements, which would speed the process up. That CSS.horse will absolutely help, though! What an awesome tool. Thanks for sharing that.
I appreciate all of your help, Matt. You’re a rockstar.
Hey, @matt. Now that I’ve published a number of articles, I’m realizing this doesn’t happen the way it’s supposed to. There’s definitely a bug.
What I’m seeing is that all images from a post are being printed into the header, resulting in multiple og:image meta tags. They appear in order of appearance, except for the last image on the page (my avatar from the post signature) which always appears first in the header.
For example, here’s a piece I just published:
You can see the multiple meta tags in the source. And on sharing a link to the article, it chooses the second image. And the second image being used in link cards is fairly consistent.
When shared, you can see that it chooses the article image that appears second:
Here’s another article you can reference which does the same thing:
When shared, it uses the second image from the article:
Any chance we can get this fixed? Thank you!
(P.S. I am absolutely loving Write.as so far. It’s serving me very well.)
Interestingly, the link cards from my reply above nullifies the consistency I mentioned. The card for the first article uses the last image from the article, while the card for the second article correctly uses the first image.
Perhaps cards are confused by the array of multiple og:image meta tags? Either way, if only the first image was printed to the header, these problems would likely subside.
@support and @matt, any thoughts on this OG issue? I really want to share my articles, but it’s hard when I have no idea what image will be used in link cards.
If we can only use the first image instead of all images in a post, that would (in theory) solve the problem.
Oh, I didn’t know it was only Matt. I thought I saw someone else helping. Maybe they used to be on the team or are just an extremely helpful fan. Ha, ha.
Anyway, I definitely wish there was more support. But I’m wholly patient. I get that it’s a small team (perhaps a team of one, as you’ve suggested) and I respect that support can be a full-time job. So when I bump a post like this, it’s because I’m very much in need. Not because I’m angry or trying to stress people out.
Thanks for the note. I hope he/they see this thread because it’s a pretty big issue that affects sharing and automatic posts to the fediverse.
Matt is a great, very thoughtful (intentional) developer. He has core principles that he sticks to. The byproduct is that movement for write.as moves at a glacial pace. By way of example, Remark.as came out a couple of years ago, and it’s in the same place without any refinement. I think it has pretty much died as a side-product, though Matt did mention renewed commitment to it. Coming from WordPress, that was an adjustment for sure. But, I’ve been using it since 2021 and have been happy with it, with no intentions of moving.
As someone who started a software company and grew it to a team of 40… the best (and first) hires I made were support. I shared that with Matt, and hopes he makes moves there.
Hey, sorry for the slow response – I appreciate your patience! This is definitely a bug I think we can fix.
When we originally implemented this, I believe we did multiple OG tags because platforms like Facebook allow you to choose between them before publishing a post. It seems that might not be the case anymore, or some platforms handle them wrong, so we can just do what we do with the Twitter cards and include the first image.
I should be able to get to that this week – will keep you updated!
I appreciate that, @justinf. I have been wanting to bring someone on for support since we haven’t had anyone else for the last few years. I’ll send you a message soon – would love to chat some more!
I’m super stoked that this is happening. However, I’m not seeing the update. Even after hard refreshing everything. Is there a DNS delay or cache setting on your server that may be slowing down the update?
I’m seeing one image being used, but it’s the last image on my views, not the first. Example:
That should show an image of an astronauts footprint, but it’s actually showing my avatar which is in my signature.
Okay, just sent out that fix! Note it might take a little bit to show up on your public / custom domain blog posts like this one, due to caching. But you can see it applied to older posts like this one.
@matt I’m noticing another oddity. Only one image is being grabbed now, and if it’s a webp that’s working as well. However, it randomly changes the image used in the OG metadata.
For example: if you view-source on the following article, then refresh the source a few times, you’ll see the image content change.
Here’s a screencast of the source code from an article on my site. I keep refreshing the page and you’ll see that, while we’re successfully seeing only a single image, that image is different every time. It cycles through the various images in my article as well as my avatar from the signature.
For me, this is the single biggest issue I have with Write.as. It impacts sharing and in pretty much every way. If there’s any chance we can get this fixed, I would love you so much.
I’m sure you have a lot in the queue. I appreciate you and thank you for giving us the space to express our feedback.
So I’m glad you pointed it out, and we could get it updated!