Articles Tagged social

The Web Share API is one that has seemingly gone under the radar since it was first introduced in Chrome 61 for Android. In essence, it provides a way to trigger the native share dialog of a device (or desktop, if using Safari) when sharing content — say a link or a contact card — directly from a website or web application.

While it’s already possible for a user to share content from a webpage via native means, they have … Read article

I love the idea of programmatically generated images. That power is close at hand these days for us front-end developers, thanks to the concept of headless browsers. Take Puppeteer, the library for controlling headless Chrome. Generating images from URLs is their default use case:

const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');

(async () => {
  const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
  const page = await browser.newPage();
  await page.goto('https://example.com');
  await page.screenshot({path: 'example.png'});

  await browser.close();
})();

That ought to get the ol' mind grape going. … Read article

This past summer, I wrote The Essential Meta Tags for Social Media about how developers can prepare web pages to optimize their appearance when shared on social media. But what about creating the links to let users share these web pages? Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn offer numerous ways to do this, some involving button generators and others that require external JavaScript. To avoid all of that, though, you can create your own links to share web pages. And the best … Read article