Since I have joined this forum, I have discovered countless amazing tools thanks to the posts in this blog category. Some of them were so exciting that I really felt like advertising them on twitter. But the tweets I tried looked highly unappealing and consequently attracted little traffic. A bummer because the tools are so cool!
I feel that a little work in making the blog page itself more visually appealing and adding a button to easily link to it in nice looking tweets with an image or graph would really help promote those amazing tools.
Yes. That is what I meant. Thank you for translating my message
There is a twitter symbol on the page, but it leads to the rOpenSci twitter account. It may be less essential than I think and I recognize that it is not, in the grand scheme of things, something very important. But I do think that tweets with a nice appealing picture can really help promote new tools.
The #rstats is followed by so many people that it is playing an important role in the R community. I am no twitter fan, but had to get a little into it when I realized this.
I think adding a Twitter share button would be another element (that’d gain from there being Twitter cards of course), could you open an issue suggesting that? I am myself less a fan of Twitter buttons because I almost always copy paste a link and start a tweet from the Twitter app/website, but I can imagine other people like that so let’s see what others think.
Reg the Twitter card I was thinking it could have simply the rOpenSci logo, very much like GitHub Twitter cards. We - well most often @stefanie! - make an effort to tweet about each new post with images/screenshots (example 1, example 2) but that selection is hard to automate. Again that’s only my opinion. Or it could be like R-Bloggers feed https://twitter.com/Rbloggers where you see the first picture in the miniature if there’s any picture in the post, but the problem I see is that the first picture isn’t always the best one.
@prosoitos! Thanks again for your feedback. Short update:
We have decided against social media share buttons under posts.
We have started adding support for Twitter cards See https://github.com/ropensci/roweb2/issues/290 We still need to add them for a few pages but now when you tweet about blog posts there’ll be a card with rOpenSci logo + the first lines from the post. From now on we’ll try to use the twitterImg in blog posts to make the card prettier i.e. featuring that image rather than the logo.
Well, I guess I was so slow getting to it that you beat me with the reply .
Totally out of curiosity, and if you were ok to share, I would be curious to hear why (no criticism at all! I am just intrigued ).
Those look great! I had not noticed them before (and because I am not into Twitter much at all, I never thought about trying to make something fancy like that. I am not even sure how to do it ).
Thanks for taking my comment into consideration so very quickly @maelle
Totally out of curiosity, and if you were ok to share, I would be curious to hear why (no criticism at all! I am just intrigued ).
We don’t like how they look, and above all assume that most people would copy paste the link and then craft a tweet.
Those look great! I had not noticed them before (and because I am not into Twitter much at all, I never thought about trying to make something fancy like that. I am not even sure how to do it ).
Fun since you gave me the idea with your initial post! It is a matter of adding the right metadata inside the pages. I followed the guidance in the two last links of my comment here. I had to add the metadata stuff to templates. If you look at the source of our homepage in the head you will see
<meta property="og:title" content="rOpenSci">
<meta property="og:type" content="website">
<meta property="description" content="Open Tools and R Packages for Open Science">
<meta property="og:description" content="Open Tools and R Packages for Open Science">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://ropensci.org/android-chrome-512x512.png" >
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@rOpenSci">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@rOpenSci">
these are the things Twitter uses to create the card. the “og:” tags are from OpenGraph which is a Facebook thing that Twitter understands too as far as I understood. Each pages has its specific metadata, for the av post it is
<meta property="og:title" content="The av Package: Production Quality Video in R - rOpenSci - open tools for open science">
<meta property="og:type" content="article">
<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary">
<meta name="twitter:image" content="http://ropensci.org/android-chrome-512x512.png" >
<meta property="description" content="At rOpenSci we are developing on a suite of packages that expose powerful graphics and imaging libraries in R. Our latest addition is av – a new package for working with audio/video based on the FFmpeg AV libraries. This ambitious new project will become the video counterpart of the magick package which we use for working with images.
install.packages("av") av::av_demo() The package can be installed directly from CRAN and includes a test function av_demo() which generates a demo video from random histograms.">
<meta property="og:description" content="At rOpenSci we are developing on a suite of packages that expose powerful graphics and imaging libraries in R. Our latest addition is av – a new package for working with audio/video based on the FFmpeg AV libraries. This ambitious new project will become the video counterpart of the magick package which we use for working with images.
install.packages("av") av::av_demo() The package can be installed directly from CRAN and includes a test function av_demo() which generates a demo video from random histograms.">
<meta name="twitter:creator" content="@rOpenSci">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@rOpenSci">
A few pages still lack the metadata but we’re getting there!
- make an effort to tweet about each new post with images/screenshots (
See 
).
It is a matter of adding the right metadata inside the pages. I followed the guidance in the two last links of