Hi All. I’ve seen this topic come up, issues with share buttons not generating expected results.
I’ve got my blog up and running and I’m working to socialize the content, however I’m bumping into an issue with Alloy and RW that I’m unclear how to resolve.
When sharing a blog URL the resulting post does not include Topper image, Author, or Publish date as expected.
I have the Page Level Social Media Tags for the Blog and Editor Pages disabled. I’ve confirmed that allow has SMTs enabled and my Twitter handle is included.
I primarily share on Twitter and LinkedIn. Both sites are not displaying the topper image as expected.
I’ll need a few things from you to troubleshoot your problem. Provide these and I can take a look at it for you when I have them in hand:
The URL to your blog.
A copy of your project file. Create a ZIP file containing your project file. This is the file you open in RapidWeaver to edit your site. After creating the ZIP file, upload it using a service like Dropbox, WeTransfer, Droplr, or a similar service to create download link for us. Send me a direct message here on the forum with that link.
The Author & Blog Post’s publishing date aren’t a part of Open Graph and Twitter Cards. Here’s what one should look like using a blog post from my blog as an example:
thanks again! - To clarify I’m referring to all Open Graph tags for Alloy. Twitter may not use Author or Publish Date, but LinkedIn does.
Either way I’m struggling to know how to control these tags when using Alloy, where are they pulled from and when.
How do they interact with “Share” buttons. Shareit - which I’ve reached out to , has an ‘Automatic’ function that isn’t clear on how it sources information and isn’t consistent between platforms (twitter or linkedIn) for example.
I’ll DM the URL and Package detail. Thank you for taking a look at this. I’m working to launch a social media campaign, drawing attention to our blog and I keep getting kneecapped by RW and this eco system of plugins. Features you’d expect to work, don’t and eat up hours of productivity.
Alloy does not add Author or Post Date to the Open Graph or Twitter Card.
You don’t control them. Alloy builds them from the Blog’s contents.
The title is pulled from your blog post’s Title. The description it taken from either the automatically truncated Summary, or your Custom Summary if you’re using that for your posts. The Image is taken from your Topper Image, and only the Topper Image.
I’ll use one of my blog posts again as an example. You’ll see here all of the OG and Twitter Card meta data that Alloy builds from your post’s contents:
Update: Oddly the testing site shared won’t load a preview for our blog URL. However linkedIn’s and Twitter’s will, though the metadata isn’t what is expected and the topper image doesn’t come through.
I grabbed the URL for the topper image, which is: https://daydreamtechnologies.com/blog-images/IMG_1488_0.JPG
This matches the URL Alloy is supplying in the meta data.
When I visit that URL however your server returns a 403 error. Perhaps this is the problem with your topper not being allowed to be pulled by other services. I can’t say how their code works. All I can say is that the meta data Alloy is generating is correct.
I can only suspect that you may have something set in your htaccess file that is preventing the bot from loading the scraping the page, or the transition effect you’re using it preventing it.
Side note, when publishing I found that this and other files are extremely large and in the wrong DPI. Not sure if you were aware or not, see below. In fact some files were so incredibly large they hung the publishing.
thank you for this. I’ll dig in. I’ll ping Joe on his Share it, and see how it handles this data… oddly the Twitter share from the blog summary page returned the summary page… however the LinkedIn from the blog summary page send the the blog URL.
I do have my .htaccess file written to control for some types of access, but I’ll start with the transition and image sizes. I’m expecting RW to optimize the image, good to know this is not the case.
It is not Transition. As I said I uploaded your blog to my server and used properly sized and formatted images and everything works as expected, as shown in the screenshots above.
Yes, I know which is which. The image I showed, the PNG logo, is from your home page. It simply timed out my upload a few times so I researched it.
Your clod image is also quite large, but thankfully not 330dpi.
Thank you. I’ll continue digging. Seems like hotlink protection and a few other things can block. What’s odd is that twitter’s own post validation tool isn’t getting much insight and the banner bear just spins LOL
I’ve added the social media domains to the hotlink protection list, reduced the image size and turned off the transition effect. Now I’m trying to assess the impact my .htaccess file may have.
