On generating social images for my blog

I recently decided to generate social images for my blog. You know those images that are being displayed by facebook or twitter when you share link on those platforms:

I want to get started and create something in finished time so I prepared a minimalistic version of banner using figma social branding template:

When I had my design in place I started searching for solutions on how to generate social images. What I wanted is:

• generate social card based on title of page/blog post
• it should be fairly easy to integrate & debug
• it should not cost me money - I’m trying stuff out now
• it should be fun to do

After a few minutes of googling/duck ducking I distilled couple of solutions:

• send image to image handling service (like cloudinary) and allow them to handle cache & image generation
• fire up chromium to make screenshot and then pass it to the twitter bot
• have one static image or generate static image per blog post & include it in e.g frontmatter

All of them have their pros & cons but I decided to use the first solution - using cloudinary. Why?

• I wanted something simple to try out stuff preferably with caching
• I tried firing up chromium but it took a hell a lot of time and I cant debug it locally
• Having static images was also problematic - what if I want to change design of my social card? Everything needs to generated one more time

How it is working?

I”m using there couple of goodies from different companies:

• netlify redirects - instead of having https://krzysztofzuraw.com/.netlify/functions/social-image?title=Home I have https://krzysztofzuraw.com/social-image?title=Home
• netlify functions for generating cloudinary URL & then redirecting bot to image
• cloudinary node API to generate cloudinary URL

I wrote about pros but what are downsides of using it approach? I feel like I’m hardcoding my image generation to cloudinary.

Resources

• https://egghead.io/lessons/figma-designing-opengraph-unfurls-in-figma
• https://www.learnwithjason.dev/blog/auto-generate-social-image/

Summary

In this post I wrote about my approach to generating social images - I’ve used cloudinary + netlify functions for that job.