If you share any of the articles posted on DEV.to to Facebook or Twitter they will automatically embed an image in your post. This is accomplished by having a set of meta-fields in the HTML of each post on DEV.to.
The critical fields are from The Open Graph protocol:
<meta property="og:image" content="" />
<meta name="twitter:image:src" content="">
The content for both of them including URL to an image. That image is what's being shared on the social networks.
Originally I wanted to show how to generate such image using Rust, but in the meantime I already created a project that will help me, and hopefully others to create such images.
See the Banner Builder project.
Images provided by other sites.
I've downloaded one of those images from DEV.to and used the file command of Linux on it. This was the result:
PNG image data, 1000 x 500, 8-bit colormap, non-interlaced
At another site the respective images was
PNG image data, 800 x 400, 8-bit/color RGBA, non-interlaced
The image of yet another site has this:
JPEG image data, JFIF standard 1.01, resolution (DPI), density 120x120, segment length 16, Exif Standard: [TIFF image data, big-endian, direntries=0], baseline, precision 8, 500x300, components 3
I realized that the title of the article might bee too long and we might need to break it into multiple lines.
We might want to add a small image of the author or the logo of the web site.
We might want to add some other logos. For example Rust if the article is about Rust.
Conclusion
Try to share this, or any other article from the Rust Maven site on a social network and let me know if you can see the image.
I saw that this works on Facebook, but on LinkedIn only a thumbnail of the image was displayed.
I have not tried it on Reddit or other social networks.
