Articles Tagged social

As a little experiment, I shared a development tip on three different social networks. I also tried to post it in a format that was most suitable for that particular social network:

• On Twitter, I made it a thread.
• On Instagram, I made it a series of images.
• On YouTube, I made it a video.

How did each of them “do”? Let’s take a look. But bear in mind… this ain’t scientific. This is just me … Read article “Comparing Social Media Outlets for Developer Tips”

The IndieWeb is a thing! They’ve got a conference coming up and everything. The New Yorker is even writing about it:

Proponents of the IndieWeb offer a fairly straightforward analysis of our current social-media crisis. They frame it in terms of a single question: Who owns the servers? The bulk of our online activity takes places on servers owned by a small number of massive companies. Servers cost money to run. If you’re using a company’s servers without paying

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 “How to Use the Web Share API”

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 “Social Cards as a Service”

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 “The Simplest (and Most Performant) Way to Offer Sharing Links for Social Media”