Social Media Sharing Excerpt Setting Field

writeas
#1

When sharing a post on social media such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn, they grab an image and sometimes an excerpt of the text.

I had an issue with the automatically generated excerpt for one of my posts:

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Screen Shot 2019-02-17 at 11.54.18.jpg1984×1464 305 KB

Facebook’s parser picked up the image but wasn’t able to figure out what text to use for the excerpt, and started with the Snap.as image URL. I got similar results when sharing the link to Telegram.

On Medium, they let you set the excerpt text rather than having the social platform’s parser attempting to take the first couple of sentences. I’d like to request this feature for Write.as.

#2

I use images from a public folder in Dropbox and those link URLs are not seen in excerpts. But I’ll add my issue here also, since my posts only get a Write.as logo + the excerpt text. Never an image, even when I start the post with an image or have many of them. The only time an image is added to excerpts is when I link the blog main site. It shows the first image from the latest post. That’s also weird. Tested with Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp and Telegram.

I use the free version of Write.as. Maybe this is a deliberate limitation? I found no mention of it. Or should I tag the image somehow so it would be used in excerpts? (no CSS in free version).

#3

Thanks for the input! This is good to know.

In the short term, we’ll fix the excerpt extraction so that it doesn’t include the Snap.as / image URL. But otherwise I’d say we might offer this option as part of the other social media-related features that have been requested here.

#4

The software should show the first image in an individual blog post as the image on social media. But right now that only works when image URLs have an image extension (.png, .jpg, .gif, etc). Do you have an example post where the image isn’t showing?

#5

Here’s an example: https://mikona.writeas.com/opas-miten-loydan-sahkoauton-latauspisteet-ja-kuinka-suunnittelen-reitit

Now that you mentioned that the image extension, that might be the case if it looks for the name at the end of the URL. Here is an example URL (shortened for easier comparison) of a pic in the markdown. It has a file name but if the raw=1 is left out, it will link to Dropbox site not just the image file:
h_ttps://www.dropbox.com/s/1td7…random_chars…az1/2019-Pistokkeet-logot-kartta.jpg?raw=1

And here is an URL of that same picture copied from the published page. It has no file name:
h_ttps://ucf3c8d57a30f8a616bf133adae3.dl.dropboxusercontent.com/cd/0/inline/Aceam0054tH…lots_of_random_chars…VmpQ/file#

(had to edit the URLs beginning so that they do not show here as broken links)