Although the social media auto-poster has been working well as far as I can tell since my last update a few days ago, I noticed that on Bluesky the links in the posts were not clickable. After a bit of research it turns out that Bluesky has an API called facets that gives you a way to turn the plain text you post into rich text. It's a bit of extra work to do this, but on the plus side you get quite a lot of control as to how the text appears. Anyhow, I made a few modifications and hopefully now the links should be clickable.
Thursday, December 18, 2025
Bluesky clickable links
Social media cards
Following on from the fix to the links in the Bluesky posts, I decided to look into improving the metadata on my blog pages so that the various social medias create nicer looking cards for my posts. In the short term I’ll use a standard image for all my posts. I might add the ability to customise this on a per post basis later, but for now they should all get a classic white text on black background.
It was a bit tricky because although Twitter lets you choose whether you display the image full width, or as a small thumbnail, all the others make the choice for you based on the resolution of the image you add in the meta data in your page <head>. I used ffmpeg to generate the image, slightly higher res for Twitter, and I updated my sites templates so the meta tags point to the right image.
The intention is for the image to appear as a small thumbnail on the left of the link, but we'll have to see how that goes, if it doesn't work I might need to make some adjustments.
New Post: Bluesky clickable links markjgsmith.com #
New Post: Social media cards markjgsmith.com #