MapX on social media: no map preview in social media posts

[MarionPlanque]

When sharing a MapX link on social media, only the link is displayed and not the content of the map (see image below). It would be better for user experience and information sharing to see a preview of the map.

[fxi]

Simple answer :

• It's not easy to integrate a contextual map preview.
• It's easy to add a generic MapX logo or default image instead of an default image like the one you shown.

Technical answer :

• First problem : MapX can share one or many views. One or many story-maps, dashboards, custom code view, custom style with a lot of parameters such as latitude, longitude or zoom. A preview thumbnail that represent what the user will get is very difficult to predict. The interface you see on your screen is complex and dynamic. Not easy to reproduce on a single image for rich content sharing.
• Second problem: Each social network could have their own way of doing this : Facebook OpenGraph or Twitter Cards for example. It's targeted to simple pre-generated website. MapX is not a simple pre-generated website. It's only one page that change its content dynamically after landing on the browser. It's called a SPA or single page application. Using one link, you could have a lot of different results. With classic webpage, one link = one fixed content. OpenGraph target those simple site.
• Partial dynamic solution : for sharing a single view, MapX could simulate this, using an alternate web page link. The share URL could point to a mini-page, create a subset of MapX and return a thumbnail and a small description.
• Quick hack : the user could choose her.himself the wanted thumbnail. Then the minipage is generated using this in the OpenGraph headers meta.

[thomaspiller]

The MapX logo is the preferred option for this development.

[thomaspiller]

Improvements have been deployed in production for the rendering of links. Is this enough to close this issue or not?

[fxi]

We should go further:

• twitter cards
• open graph

Short term :

• Short links service could do partial SSR with those social meta tags and js redirect to the real thing, app or static.

Long term :

• Global hybrid SSR/SPA instead of static prebuilt HTML for our SPA

Both will hugely boost our SEO: now, most of our content is accessible through the interface but most crawlers are helpless to index anything.

Some parts of MapX do not comply to semantic conventions: lots of buttons + tons of js, few links and navigation. Normal for a SPA, but terrible for SEO: pushing towards SSR or partial SSR could solve two issues at once.