Testing A New willow.camp Feature

I don’t like competing for clicks. But I do like people reading my blog.

If you landed here form LinkedIn, you probably saw a colorful image showing the title of this post. Where is that image?! It’s in the Open Graph tags in the head of this page.

When I launched willow.camp, I intentionally kept social-media style features out of it. willow.camp doesn’t track views (aside from what’s needed for performance and bug monitoring), and doesn’t have likes or comments.

But it was missing something.

When I shared posts to LinkedIn, my posts would show up as plain text. Despite having no analytics, I get the feeling that some people miss my posts because they are overwhelmed by a sea of images.

So here I am. Writing a social media feature for willow.camp that is in beta (meaning I am the beta tester!) If you are using willow.camp, I’ll release this feature once I’ve put the right polish on it.

I added a canvas to the post editing interface that grabs the theme colours, favicon, and title to create an Open Graph image that LinkedIn can see. This is the first time I have image storage.

The images are stored locally on the server, so I’ll run out of space one day. But for now, I’m going to test this out and polish up the user experience before making it more broadly available.