After years of doing SAAS apps for others in the agency world, I'm finally working on own first ever SAAS app!
It lets you easily add these dynamic, templated "Link preview" images to your pages so that when they are shared, a nice picture with tailored information can be shown instead of a generic stock image or something irrelevant.
It's not a new idea: github.com and dev.to already do this (you can see custom pictures for every link), but it requires a lot of infrastructure work / puppeteer configuration that not every one can afford to do.
This service allows any site (Wordpress, shopify, laravel, react, vue etc...) to easily add them.
This is the first time I share it online. I'm at a point where I need to gather feedback from real users. At the moment it's completely free, but if it gains traction and higher traffic sites use it, I will have to add paid plans to make it sustainable. Free account will still work but with a capped amount of requests (that should be high enough for smaller sites to stay on a free plan)...
While I'm here, any better name ideas for the project? I stuck with ogimg.io, but turns out my friends see this as "Original Gangster images" instead of "Open Graph images"...
Anyways, first ever full-on SAAS product I roll out on my own so I'm pretty excited to see where it goes!
You can check out bannerbear (and bunch of others) who are already in this space. There is a clear need here. Wish you Good luck for your first SAAS journey.
In JavaScript, for example, on a theoretical blog site, you could configure it like this:
const article = await fetchArticle(router.query.id);
const queryString = new URLSearchParams(article).toString();
const url = `https://cdn.ogimg.io/v1/u/your-name/blog?${queryString}`;
// add this in the <head> where appropriate...
<meta property="og:image" content="${url}" />
This will add nice pictures for all your articles at once based on your template.
I think I need to make this more clear!
With a static site generator I can make the og:image generation part of the build process and host the result myself. Less burden for you, more security for me.
Ex: blog posts, products, buy/sell sites, etc.
If your page already has a custom image made in photoshop with text on it, it's not very useful (as you would want to use your custom image anyways).
This needs to be clearer on the home page, thanks for trying it!
You could probably detect a scenario where all of that is already present and maybe noop or have a more minimal presentation tailored for that.
Thanks for sharing!