social meta for non-posts (preview image for site)

[shannonpileggi]

Hi lovely distill developers! In this brief tweet exchange we noticed and discussed that when sharing distill websites (not specific blog posts) that the link renders on social media without a preview image.

Would it be possible to jazz up the look on social media? Just a nice-to-have!

[apreshill]

Hi @shannonpileggi! I agree, looks like @jjallaire added this to the next version milestone.

I wonder if in the meantime metathis would work?

https://github.com/gadenbuie/metathis

[shannonpileggi]

Super, thanks for the quick reply and a possible solution! I am happy to wait for v1.3, whenever that may be. :)

[HenrikBengtsson]

I'm not 100% sure that this issue is the same as my feature request but I hope so. I want to be able to specify a default preview centrally in _site.yml, e.g.

preview: https://rstudio.github.io/distill/images/javascript-d3-preview.png

or alternatively also as:

base_url: https://rstudio.github.io/distill
preview: images/javascript-d3-preview.png

Is that what's proposed here?

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BTW/FYI, right now I specify base_url in _site.yml and preview in the yaml header for each page. That get's me halfway there.
However, when doing this I end up with a /./ component in the URL, e.g.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://rstudio.github.io/distill/./images/javascript-d3-preview.png"/>

When specifying base_url in the yaml header, this doesn't happen, i.e.

<meta property="og:image" content="https://rstudio.github.io/distill/images/javascript-d3-preview.png"/>

This is with distill 1.2.