Meta tag, Open Graph, and Twitter sharing metadata problems

[daveverwer]

As part of looking over whether we should merge #162, I noticed we have some problems with how we are using our meta tags, including Open Graph and Twitter tags.

When people share URLs from Swift.org, they currently use the site description for the Open Graph and Twitter meta tags, meaning the Mentorship page previews using the site title and site description:

There are several things we could do better:

• Tweak the conditional meta tags around lines 36 and 49 of base.html, only falling back to the site title and description when absolutely nothing else is available.
• Attempt to get auto-excerpts working for pages that are not blog posts. I’m not quite sure how they are working for blog posts right now since we don’t use an excerpt_separator. This needs a little investigation.
• Every page should already have a sensible title, so even without automated excerpts, we should change it so we use the page title in Open Graph and Twitter meta tags.
• Stretch Goal: We should consider adding custom explicit excerpts for pages that get linked to a lot, like the workgroup pages, getting started, and community pages.

[dempseyatgithub]

• Attempt to get auto-excerpts working for pages that are not blog posts. I’m not quite sure how they are working for blog posts right now since we don’t use an excerpt_separator. This needs a little investigation.

Looking at the jekyll docs, the first paragraph of a blog post is automatically used as an excerpt even without using the excerpt_separator.

Excerpts for pages can be enabled by setting page_excerpts to true in the config file for Jekyll 4.1.1 and later, so we should be able to use it.

[dempseyatgithub]

I just started working on this so am assigning to myself.

[dempseyatgithub]

Making progress. I have automated page excerpts working in my fork.

For some pages an explicit excerpt will be required, not just a 'nice to have'. Two examples: Downloads, where the first paragraph is blank, so the excerpt is an empty string. Blog, where the automatic excerpt includes all of the blog posts, making for a gigantic excerpt.