Dynamic Open Graph images. New premium feature!

When you share a link to your blog, social media sites use Open Graph to render a preview of it. If your Pagecord post has an image it it, this image will be used by Open Graph. As a result, when you link to one of your posts on X, LinkedIn, WhatsApp etc, it will look something like this:

The problem historically has been for posts that are just text, which is the majority of posts on Pagecord. Social media platforms don't do a great job of previewing these, so I thought we should fix that in Pagecord.

If you're a premium subscriber, Pagecord will now dynamically generate an Open Graph image for text-only posts! This works by taking the title of the post, the blog title and the avatar (if any), then rendering these as an image using some Cloudflare wizardry that I won't go into here. I think it looks pretty good!

Here's an example from a recent post on this blog:

What's more, if you've customised your blog theme colours then the preview will inherit those (light mode version). Here's a particularly cool example from James:

This also works if you share a link to your blog home, as opposed to a specific post. In this case it uses the blog title and the domain name, as well as the avatar if present. Here's an example of Sylvia's fab blog:

For now this remains a premium feature as there is some (admittedly small) cost to generating the images, and it's more infrastructure to maintain. It might be something that rolls out to everyone in time, but I want to see how it goes with paying customers for the time being. On that, don't forget that Premium is only $29/yr, so if you're not a paying subscriber please consider it! It's the best deal out there 😊

Note: If you want to test it out without posting to the socials, I recommend using Linkpreview or OpenGraph.xyz