#dev 2024-02-12
2024-02-12 UTC
rhiaro, jan6, AramZS, cambridgeport90, tPoltergeist, [Joe_Crawford], AramZS_, gRegor, angelo, sandra, eitilt, [aciccarello], [jeremycherfas] and [Al_Abut] joined the channel
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[Al_Abut] @_tommys sorry, I didn’t follow! What do you mean by doing the opposite?
# [Al_Abut] tangent: ugh, I just had such a frustrating night trying to get social sharing previews to work right with open graph tags and the only one that works right… is Twitter. The network I hate the most and use the least.
# [Al_Abut] I should document this somewhere, that FB/Threads/Linkedin all have black box implementations that ignore meta tags, no matter what their docs and debuggers say, even if that means scaling up a tiny image until it looks gross and jaggy. I’m trying to keep my pages lightweight and lean download-wise but I think I’m going to give up and throw a big high res image at the bottom with a lazy-loading attribute
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# [Al_Abut] actually wait, I think mastodon does the right thing too. that’s nice.
mahboubine, tPoltergeist, gRegor, box464, jacky, benji, Virtual, alephalpha0, paotsaq, strugee_, sivoais, AramZS, superkuh and [KevinMarks] joined the channel
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[tantek] speaking of publics and different Mastodon vs "web" expectations, this seemed topical: https://docs.joinmastodon.org/user/posting/#home-feed-visibility-for-replies cc: [snarfed]
# [snarfed] on a related note, got my asbestos suit on this morning, https://indieweb.social/@snarfed.org@snarfed.org/111919385075708671
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# [Al_Abut] No I didn’t! I’ll search for it because if I fixed it then it’s by accident (and that means I can break it again)
# [Al_Abut] But I did reorder my posts like you’d mentioned
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# [Al_Abut] Ah, thanks! Yeah I think I backfilled all of the static, er, non-templated pages recently.
# [Al_Abut] Can I ask how it came about that you noticed it in the first place? Did it break an app you were using?
# [tantek] [snarfed] do we have a phrase for the "thundering herd of Mastodons" phenomenon when you post something new "to the fediverse"? note that adactio discovered this for himself, it was bad enough that it was causing MySQL failures on his relatively simple site! https://adactio.com/journal/20881
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gRegor I think I used the FB Share Debugger and it indicated no og:image, but had "guessed" one, probably the first largest image it found. Then I checked the source of that post and opened the og:image URL, which was 404, text/html content. Seems their debug tool should report that instead of silently skipping over it
# [tantek] I wonder if we need an indiewebifyme feature to check for OGP in an h-entry and if the page already has the info deterministically (e.g. same image resource is wide enough to be auto-detected by FB) then indiewebifyme could do a lint-style warning to the h-entry author that their e.g. og:image was unnecessary and cite the wiki reference
# [Al_Abut] Oh my god, it’s so much more complicated than that
# [Al_Abut] I don’t know if I can thumb type fast enough to get across how infuriatingly broken FB’s debugger is AND how inconsistent with their actual sharing previews
# [Al_Abut] Like, you can list something as an ogi image and have it still say it’s not there, or say it’s there but then the actual preview pane grabs something else anyway
# [Al_Abut] I spend hours poking at the black box last night
# [Al_Abut] Yeah but it would do that - does do that still - even if you have an image
# [Al_Abut] Yep
# [Al_Abut] I’ve got like 3-4 social sharing validators all queued up to cross compare and none of them agree
# [Al_Abut] I’ll have to look it up, I’m on the go now
# [Al_Abut] Yeah that’s the strategy I’m coming back to @tantek, looks like I had to bang my head on the so-called right way to do it for a weekend
# [Al_Abut] Definitely could share some notes with [KevinMarks], if nothing else than to console each other, lol. I feel like I woke up from a fever dream.
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[KevinMarks] I posted the link here this morning. I found a way to give each site a different image
# [Al_Abut] Like, my next strategy is to strip out my photo avatar from my blog post footer because it’s getting selected as the sharing image, even though it’s not fit for purpose and gets ugly when scaled up, AND I’ve already specified a cleanly designed one in the meta tags
# [KevinMarks] Though that may have changed since, as Google has shut down some methods
# [Al_Abut] Yeah I skimmed that post, that covered the basics of what they’re all *supposed* to be doing, but going through each of the actual sharing panes with various post types revealed a very different reality
# [KevinMarks] An updated review would be worth doing definitely
# [KevinMarks] Both mastodon and bluesky have preview tools now
# [Al_Abut] It’s a moving target and I’m almost at a stable strategy, I’m leaning towards [tantek]’s strategy of using in-body images (since some of them are going to grab that anyway no matter what I put in the header) and then combining it with srcset to customize the aspect ratios
# [Al_Abut] The two big issues from grabbing the wrong image are 1) selecting a low res image that gets distorted when scaled up or 2) grabbing one that’s high res but gets cropped weird, like focuses on a torso and removes faces.
# [Al_Abut] Ah! So there’s too many meta tags and it bails or something?
# [Al_Abut] Yet another reason for me to finally tackle css grids and cut out all those crufty old external stylesheets…
# [Al_Abut] I could’ve sworn there’s a button that says “see what our API sees” and it showed the entire head section…
# [Al_Abut] Oh no wait, you’re saying my head section is malformed? Well that’s embarrassing
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# [KevinMarks] Have a look with a browser preview as it will show you what it thinks is inside <head>
# adfreeaichat https://chat.indieweb.org/2024-02-12#bottom
# adfreeaichat https://adfreeaichat.com/
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# [Al_Abut] [gRegorLove] thanks dude, that’s a huge help. I bet I screwed something up when porting to Astro (user error for sure)
# [Al_Abut] If this works, I owe you like five burritos
# [Al_Abut] I hope so! Will post back my findings for sure, just been fun to share something so minor that I’ve been toiling away on
# [Al_Abut] Srcset looks promising because the social sharing ratios are typically wide (like 1.91:1 in FB’s case) and that coincidentally has the same cropping and scaling issues as large images on laptops, so you could make those wide images the default and then have backup alternate images that are square or tall to uncrop them for mobile, tablet, etc.
# [Al_Abut] And it also can help with the reverse - subjects appearing too small on mobile. You can see that problem with the shot of [Joe_Crawford] bodysurfing: looks epic on larger screens, microscopic on mobile.
# [Al_Abut] I mean look how small he is here compared to my chihuahuas, haha
# [Al_Abut] “Ant-Man 3: We hit the waves.”
# [Al_Abut] Ha! Perfect timing, posted today.
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# [tantek] has anyone written a response to this or related posts that debunks the whole collapsing blaming webmentions/pingbacks together, or everything being Bridgy backfeed's fault or ... (so many other mistaken conclusions in this post) https://brainbaking.com/post/2023/05/why-i-retired-my-webmention-server/
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capjamesg [tantek] The book system works as follows: detect and segment all books, to the pixel level, with a machine learning model. For each book: crop, rotate to the left by 90 degrees, send to GPT with Vision for OCR (GPT has great OCR that's easy to set up and is fast; could use the Apple OCR API on Mac but that would limit the script to macOS-only), look up book with Google Books API, create SVG and overlay it on image.
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# [campegg] [tantek] I shared some thoughts about the webmention thing, but didn't "debunk" anything; while I don't agree with many of the things he said, I also think it's perfectly valid for him to feel that way about webmentions (too complex, fiddly, not worthwhile, whatever). If he doesn't want to use them, that's his call.
# [campegg] The only thing I really took exception to was the privacy element, and there was a pretty good discussion around that in #indieweb yesterday morning (starting around 7:30am Eastern).
# [campegg] Fair. I also don't think I'm technically adept enough to argue some of that with a computer scientist-type person—I lack the ability to articulate how and why those misconceptions are… misconceived? on a technical level.
# [Al_Abut] [gRegorLove] thanks for pointing me in the right direction with the clue about the meta tags. Turns out that I’d made a mess out of how Astro handles different types of templates and screwed up the <head> section in a beautiful variety of ways… 😂
# [Al_Abut] but Murphy’s law keeps kicking me. All those fixes are stranded locally because GitHub and Netlify randomly stopped getting along and hate my builds now.
# [Al_Abut] Think it’s a sign to step away for a bit and touch actual grass 🤷♂️
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# gRegor Few years old, but maybe some relevant points re: webmention in https://martymcgui.re/2020/07/15/what-we-talk-about-when-were-talking-about-webmentions/
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# [Al_Abut] Oh it sounds so much more official to say “I am engaging the outdoors grass protocol.” I like it 👍
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