Editing cross-post template

Is there a template for cross-posts that I can edit? I’m looking at the documentation and see explanations of what is sent but not how to tweak that.

My reason for asking is that currently BlueSky posts show a very magnified and noisy version of my profile picture, and I’d like to change that.

No, there’s no direct way for us as end-users to change that template. Indirectly, though, there might be a way to fix the issue depending on where and how Bluesky fetches the profile picture.

That brings up another question: is that pic from my micro.blog profile or my BlueSky profile? I use the same pic both places, so I can’t say. I’ll try changing one and see what happens.

If you have a minute, post a screenshot too, to make sure we’re all on the same page with what is happening. Bluesky doesn’t usually show a preview of linked blog posts (like Mastodon does).

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This is from the BlueSky web portal:

This is from OpenVibe

It appears the culprit is OpenVibe.

I wonder if it would look better if I put an image in the post . . .

Web portal

Openvibe

I still don’t know if Openvibe is grabbing the image from my post or from my BlueSky profile. Posts I create in BlueSky directly don’t exhibit this behavior. I’ll try changing my profile pic to see which it is.

It’s going to use OpenGraph on the page, which is going to have an image when a post has an image and fall back to your profile photo when there is no image, probably, because it’s the only image on the page. Hugo’s opengraph internals try hard to grab any photo on the page. Mine shows up with no photo unless there’s a photo in my blog post because my theme doesn’t include my profile photo on any pages.

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Changed my BlueSky profile to epic beard Ken (from covid), and the post image stayed the same. That would indicate that the image is coming from micro.blog.

Since I also cross-post to Mastodon, I checked there, and it’s showing the same behavior as BlueSky. I also checked Threads, which has a different profile pic, but I’m seeing the same pic in the post as in BlueSky and Mastodon.

I know you filter for images smaller than 200x200 in your cross-post code, but my profile is larger than that. I can’t edit the cross post in BlueSky to see if my profile pic is in there somewhere. I’m also wondering if OpenVibe is grabbing one of my profile pics locally because it has nothing to put in there—compare to Ivory (below).

This is what I see in Ivory. It seems to think there should be a picture there but can’t locate the file.

@jsonbecker Gotcha.

OpenGraph is a protocol to exchange social media posts between platforms?

This is the header of my home page:

And this is in the footer of the post page:
Screenshot 2025-01-13 at 2.27.45 PM

I’d have no issue with removing my image from the post footer, especially if that would clean up cross posts.

BTW, I’m using slightly tweaked Marfa.

OpenGraph is a standard for metadata on webpages that many social media platforms use to generate “rich” previews. Above is the link to Hugo and how it structures opengraph, which is what Micro.blog inherits.

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So . . . my post is being sent as a page in OpenGraph format, and the various services and apps use OpenGraph to render a rich preview of the page in my post? That makes sense–Bsky.app, Mastodon.social, Ivory, and Openvibe all look different because they are using the same OpenGraph data/metadata to generate their own rich previews.

The upshot is that this is (mostly) a function of how Openvibe is generating the preview. If I remove my profile pic from my post footer, the problem should go away. I could try tweaking my profile pic on micro.blog to one that will render better as a post preview in Openvibe, although I suspect Micro.blog will resize any footer image I use to save bandwidth. Correct?

I don’t think there’s any inherent resizing unless it’s happening in your theme specifically. And you can probably edit templates in your header and/or use some settings at the config level for what you want the default to be if you care a lot.

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Gotta learn some Hugo. Just when I was getting a handle on the CSS. :roll_eyes:

FWIW, I checked the OG metadata using a site I found. All the previews they displayed complained about a missing image. Gotta dig into OG more to know what they want to see.

Question: are services getting OG metadata from the cross post, or are they pulling it from the blog page? I site I used above only had the URL of my post, so I’m guessing the latter.

Edit: I checked the page source, and I don’t see any OG metadata in the header at all. Could it be that the Marfa theme doesn’t generate this?

It could be, and it is typical that services will look at any link, will look for OG data at that link, and sometimes, if not found, try and figure something out on their own. They try very hard to “unfurl” links. Your lack of OG data could, in fact, point to why the experience is inconsistent on each service-- it depends on how hard that particular service/application is working to “fill in” the missing OG data. In the case of OpenVine, hard enough to take any <img> it can find on the page.

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