Tag Archives: social-media-sharing

mailto, Facebook, and all the other social networking shares

Did you know that you can use " in a mailto:?subject=, but not %22?* Well, now you do. That was an annoying little problem, although to be fair, not nearly as annoying as trying to figure out why I could make Facebook share the new pages, but no one else could. Thank the gods for stackoverflow, that’s where I find most of the answers to my many coding issues. In this case, it’s how I learned about the “Do you want to make this app and all its live features available to the general public?” button. Thanks for not including that in your Share tutorials, Facebook!

I have learned a heck of a lot–over more time than I thought it would take–about customizing share buttons for social networks. I’d like to thank Pinterest for being by far the easiest of them all, and I curse Google+ for being a thorn in all my sides (‘though Facebook was no picnic either). Despite my best efforts to control the information using schema.org and itemprops, Google+ still insists on pulling its share info from just the og:title tag, which is not nearly enough information for one tag. I hate you, Google+. Just want you to know that.

Soon I’ll be able to post a link to this project that has ruled my life for the past two months. I’m hoping it’ll be today, for Veterans Day. It would be especially fitting for a project called “World War I: War of Images, Images of War.”

[ *Edited to add: And it turns out %22 wasn’t the problem at all–apparently the combination of two quotes and a colon is what was flipping out the email share. Couldn’t find a combination that would work, so I had to nix the quotes in favor of the colon. So stupid. ]

Twitter Cards

As you may or may not have seen in the Twitter feed on the homepage, I’ve been having a devil of a time figuring out Twitter Cards, which are awesome and head-bang-y all at the same time. Adding a headline and image to a tweet that DOESN’T count towards the 140 character limit is pretty awesome, but figuring out why the description wasn’t also showing up was, well, troublesome.

Fortunately, thanks to this lovely website, I now know there’s a card type called “summary_large_image”, which fixed my problem lickety-split! Funny how none of the other websites I’d been researching on had thought to mention it. Hmph.