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2025/12/18 #

Bluesky clickable links

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. #

Social media cards

markjgsmith

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. #

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