Add OpenGraph meta tags (share preview data)?

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

👋 Long-time user, first-time reporter here - love the site!

The confs.tech URL doesn't show very much when shared in social preview locations like Bluesky or Discord. You can see previews of common sites on https://www.opengraph.xyz/url/https%3A%2F%2Fconfs.tech%2F. Here's what I get sharing on Bluesky today:

Would you accept a PR adding some basic HTML meta tags for a nicer share preview?

[cgrail]

That would be great

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

🤔 so I looked into it and the tags should already be present:

confs.tech/src/components/Head/Head.tsx

Line 38 in dff70e0

<meta content='Confs.tech' property='og:title' />

...but they're not present on the deployed site, or even when served from the build folder locally after npm run build. So this is some shenanigan with how scripts/build.js creates the site.

[nimzco]

Hey @JoshuaKGoldberg ! They are present, but on the rendered site. It appears after react loads.

It is possible that opengraph only checks the HTML that the server renders and not what is rendered with JavaScript. In that case, you might have to update https://github.com/tech-conferences/confs.tech/blob/main/public/index.html instead 🤔

[JoshuaKGoldberg]

Would it be possible to change the deployment strategy to pre-render the site? I could send a PR to add some basic meta tags in the meantime but that seems to me like a bandaid fix that adds duplicate code.

[nimzco]

Would it be possible to change the deployment strategy to pre-render the site

Probably. It's currently deployed through Heroku as a static site. I'm not so sure what we need to update to get the site to be SSR. We probably would have to have a Node.js server doing it.
Given what the website does, if it's just for the meta tag, it's probably not worth the effort. And it might add additional hosting costs. 🤔