Share dem links! Share em good! Thomas Boutell 11/19 '14

Hey guys, no robitussin for me tonight. So I managed to shake loose some time to work on OPW's link-sharing features. The jump from the hack I had before to handling this... closer to properly... was a big one, but there's definite progress.

Here are some examples:


This strip has nonexistent semantic markup, which is geek-speak for "it's hard to embed it right," so I'm pleased with how they turn out now when you just paste a link to that day's comic page. I had to edit the title a little, and supplied my own description; it automatically picked the right image (the largest one, by area). You can also tap on the image to cycle through alternatives, if any decent ones were present.


Girl Genius looks good too. There was a problem with overlap— oops, I fixed it.


XKCD: 100A.


This one has an automatic summary, because they supply a proper og:description element. The best available image is pretty crap, though; reminds me that I need to add an option to remove the image entirely.

I also found a few links just now that don't work at the moment. Probably I need to specify a user agent string and then they will cooperate perhaps.

This is an iterative improvement; more are planned. Please do open issues via the bug button.

Thanks!

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11/19 '14 14 Comments
I heart Agatha Heterodyne. (And of course who doesn't love XKCD?) I'd never seen the mutant babies one before. Cheers for that.
Beth Adele
When I read this post with Chrome on my Android device, the images are left-justified, but too large to display, so it cuts off about a fifth of the image on the right-hand side. Images that are not part of links, on the other hand, are shown in their entirety, as in your "An oldie but goodie" post from a while back.
Chris Koeberle
Roger that. I need to check out the mobile treatment. Thanks.
Thomas Boutell
Yay! Two things: 1) I did not know that clicking a pic will click me out of OPW, and coming back is always a pain because expanded posts recompress and I lose my spot; and 2) I love reading the hover text in XKCD cartoons, and it's not showing, but that's a small one.

Great work! I can imagine the jump to this required a lot of work. xoxo
Karen Kuhl
Thanks for the feedback!

1. Some people love "click to open in new tab." Some people think it's the devil. Opinions welcome. As for expanded posts recompressing, that is something we ought to fix by recording that information in the hashtag part of the URL, so that we can re-open things correctly when you click "back."
2. I'm not gunning for "don't bother clicking through to the other site to read the funny" here, as content owners tend to take a dim view of that, and for understandable reasons. The size is meant to be big enough to look cool and get the idea across but still leave you interested in viewing other people's stuff. Not, um, stealing their stuff.
Thomas Boutell
I'm in the camp that views opening links in a new window/tab as breaking the back button. Or, the Devil. It's trivial to ctrl-click if you want to force a new window, but there's no way to easily tell a link to open in the same window (nor should there be, because that has always been the default).

In case you wanted opinions.
Chris Herdt
Seems like good logic to me.
Matt Lichtenwalner
Opinions appreciated!
Thomas Boutell
I prefer links to by default open in a new window unless the back button works perfectly, and I mean perfectly, every time, and I mean every time.
Sean M Puckett
Yeah, I think that should be our ambition but we haven't done much with paying attention to it yet.
Thomas Boutell
Excellent point on both accounts. :)
Karen Kuhl
The XKCD strip makes me wonder if perhaps bringing the alt and/or title (I forget which he uses) attributes across might be nice.
R. Francis Smith
As I was saying to Karen, I'm actually bringing over images big enough that it's perilously close to "don't bother going to that other site that totally owns this image" as it is. So I reckon I need to leave some curiosity pointing in the direction of clicking through, or people may be quite understandably put out with me.
Thomas Boutell
That is completely cool, and it did cross my mind, but you know, one likes to float ideas. :) I'm definitely all for supporting the creators, which reminds me, I need to go poke at my Patreon account...
R. Francis Smith