From the Department of Putting My Money Where My Mouth Is: this site now supports Twitter cards. This basically means that I’ve added a bit of meta information to each post so that if a link to that post appears in any tweet, that tweet will automatically attach a “rich” preview of the content. When viewed in Twitter (or rather on Twitter’s Web site or within any of Twitter’s official apps), you’ll see the post’s headline, its accompanying image, and the first few lines of the text. Here’s an example:
Nice piece from @khoi about the iPhone 6's "uninspired" design. http://t.co/qniFNIpSKC
— Michael Workman (@MichaelWorkman) October 1, 2014
Twitter’s implementation of the card metaphor is a little bit confusing. The entire tweet itself looks like a card, but the actual card—as defined by Twitter’s own specifications—is actually the part that appears below the time and date stamp, between the two gray horizontal rules. (I’d be very eager to see Twitter’s design language reconciled with its card language.)
Adding support for Twitter cards is not particularly hard, especially if, like me, you use WordPress. The JM Twitter Cards plugin makes the process pretty straightforward. I recommend it. Cards make for a richer presence for your content in Twitter, and purportedly increase engagement.
There’s a secondary benefit to enabling Twitter cards on your site: it makes getting your cards into Wildcard very simple. This is a bit of a cheat, as Wildcard is still not available to the public, but that will change pretty soon. Get ready!
Read more about cards in my post from August: “What Is a Card?”
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