Social media card images from page metadata

[choldgraf]

Context

When users share links on social media, a growing trend is to automatically generate an image that contains metadata about the link. For example, here are the cards that GitHub generates for any GitHub link:

And here's an example of what Jupyter Book generates now (it is modeled after GitHub)

We should add functionality to generate social media preview images for the MyST themes (or, as a plugin). This could be triggered with a flag, or be the default behavior unless a user explicitly provides their own thumbnail image.

References and links

• This discussion has a number of examples for inspiration
• Satori is a tool for generating images from HTML.
• Curvenote has done this before

Tasks and updates

[rowanc1]

Ah nice. Yes, that would be great, I do think this might be better in the theme-repository. Recently we did something like this for a journal:

That implementation required a server running to serve the thumbnails dynamically, but we could compute them up front as well for myst.

If we leave this as part of the theme then I think we can be opinionated about the styles and do something that is nice, and has a good fallback when no image is included.

[choldgraf]

Moving this to the myst-theme repository, and also noting that I wished this existed again when I was writing the report here:

https://2i2c.org/report-czi-2021/