Adding favicon, site description and publish date to oneboxes

One thing I noticed in the “slack” version of onebox is that it has a bunch of info on onebox generic that we do not.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/11/13/oldest-winery-found-in-eastern-europe-after-wine-residue-detected-in-jars_a_23275965/?utm_hp_ref=au-homepage

vs

Relevant og/html tags:

<link rel="icon" href="http://www.blogsmithmedia.com/www.huffingtonpost.com.au/assets-h4e2c2f72319695bb7776ddc2c3a6b164/favicon.ico?h=cf339f2d96daf6c7aecc6bf0eba0cdac" type="image/x-icon" />
<meta property="og:site_name" content="Huffington Post Australia" />
<meta property="og:type" content="article" />
<meta property="article:published_time" content="2017-11-14T07:58:00+11:00" />

The publish time is particularly interesting for og:type article, because its news and when it happened makes a big diff. Favicon and nice title are a great little touch.

How do we feel about improving this @codinghorror ?

12 Likes

Yeah this is a good point

I think adding the publish time and date is the easiest, if it is in the metadata… maybe site name if it is there too, which is easier than pulling <title> … so can we start with that @techAPJ

3 Likes

Title there is: Oldest Winery Found In Eastern Europe After Wine Residue Detected In Jars … we would render it twice if we used title. What we want is og:site_name if it is available instead of the actual site URL.

All changes should be fairly simple, and now that we download onebox images they will not incur any cross site talking after processed for favicon.

4 Likes

Favicon is going to be much pain and trauma, but I agree on the other two, if the metadata is present, let’s use it… whitelist that metadata. Handle those first @techAPJ then we can deal with favicon foibles later.

4 Likes

Added site name and published date to generic oneboxes via:

https://github.com/discourse/onebox/commit/4ca98ccf7035a4e584bc5ebee736d4e54483738f

Examples:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/11/13/oldest-winery-found-in-eastern-europe-after-wine-residue-detected-in-jars_a_23275965

https://www.vox.com/videos/2017/11/20/16670266/trucking-eld-surveillance

https://www.theverge.com/2017/11/20/16672600/oneplus-5t-smartphone-android-2017-review

5 Likes

I find the styling of the date somewhat rough, can we try something more along these lines?

Also I kind of wish for a bit more text next to the site title, but maybe its just cause “The Verge” is so short.

@awesomerobot thoughts?

Also how are we localizing dates in onebox now?

5 Likes

Also we don’t need to know it was published at 9am on November 20th, 2017… I think the date alone is sufficient @techapj.

4 Likes

True, you can keep the full time in the tooltip for a nice touch

Ideally we want “3 days ago” but that is a pretty big technical challenge for small amount of gain

1 Like

No, these are baked once, that ‘3 days ago’ would be permanently baked into the post, wouldn’t it? Needs to be an absolute date. I think that’s generally preferable anyway in this case for external data.

Technically we have a post processor that runs live on every post just like @joffreyjaffeux plugin works, but totally agree it’s a pretty big pain to implement and email is a problem even if web is straightforward to solve

Done via

and

I don’t think we are localizing dates in onebox yet. Will investigate more and reply here.

6 Likes

Onebox now support favicon as well. Examples:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/2017/11/13/oldest-winery-found-in-eastern-europe-after-wine-residue-detected-in-jars_a_23275965/

15 Likes