Over on my PolyWogg.ca site, I’ve posted a couple of “FlashForwardFriday” posts where I talk about an upcoming or current project, talk about where it’s going, etc. Today’s post is more appropriate to ThePolyBlog.ca as that’s where the posts will show up.

I confess I have a lot of writing sub-genres and things that I do. Music is on the list, reviews of tv shows and movies, etc. And on this site, I have 90+ quotes that I put up on the site in the past. My desire has always been the same…that a few times a week, maybe even 4-5 times a week, I’ll post a quote. Could be a pithy saying, could be funny, could be an idiom, could be poignant, could be long and detailed. But something that struck my fancy.

I confess that I threw a bunch up on the site at one point, just in plain text with a little bit of formatting. But, well, they’re not that exciting. Or to be a little blunter, they’re not something you would likely share.

Partly because when you try to “share” them on any social media platform, all you get is the link, not the actual quote. What I have REALLY wanted is some sort of meme-like option. Yet I didn’t really have one. I played with some formats over time…I tried creating really interesting memes where there were pictures in them, quotes to the side (a bit like a photo card). I added my frog as a logo, and even some other clipart to give an ongoing theme perhaps.

But when you then uploaded that image to a website, all the text disappeared — it wasn’t searchable, it’s just the “image”. Which is theoretically more shareable but not necessarily any good on the website itself. It has been, quite frankly, annoying.

So I kind of forgot about it for a while.

Some small changes over time

Without getting too technical, when you share a link from a website to something like social media, the social media platform looks at the link, decides if there is an appropriately-tagged image on that site, and assumes that is the image you want to share. If you have a sophisticated website like a newspaper or magazine with lots of staff to play with all those settings and correct them manually if necessary, everything runs tickety boo. If there’s ONLY one image, it will probably use it by default, although not always. There are some technical settings about image size, resolutoin, etc. that varies for different social media sites.

If, however, you’re little old me, running a personal WordPress site with limited overhead and support, well, you have to code it yourself. Now, because I have very specific design aesthetics, not all of my posts have a nice glossy photo with it. Actually, most of them don’t. I do have genre images … like this one is a bit about the website, so I could do a featured image of a computer, or it’s about some struggles, so I have one of a person frustrated at the computer, or I could use a featured image (as I am) of a quote bubble. As that’s what the post is about — quotes on the website.

But that’s not an image of the quote itself, just something akin to being an oversized emoji. Soooo, often when you see my posts shared, the “image” it shows with it is either something IN the post (a pic of me travelling or a book cover) or quite often, the giant emoji image for that genre of post. Social media groups love images, and if it has to take an emoji, it will.

There is a way, on a website, to use something called OPENGRAPH settings which basically tell any site linking to it that if it wants an image, start by looking at the one with a proper OG tag on it. That works about 80% of the time, assuming the site being shared to recognizes the use of OG settings. WordPress added better support for it a few years ago, and I tweaked things enough that I half-implemented it. It pulled the emojis better, all good.

But I also use a plugin for Buffer’s social media manager to handle the interface between my WordPress site AND the various social media platforms that I’m part of — Facebook (I’m old), Twitter (it was a bit hipper when I started, and not so toxic), Threads and BlueSky (both new for me). I don’t have to manage a plugin for each of those, nor do I want to manage it directly. To be honest, FB is a giant pain in the butt to link to well if you have both a personal account and a page account. They tweak this or that and suddenly your posts won’t go up. I went through a number of different FB plugins that would “help” facilitate the management of all that, and I eventually said “Screw it.” I pay Buffer a nominal fee each month and in return they handle all the links with all the media platforms. They make it work for all their customers rather than all the customers figuring the latest tweak out themselves.

And Buffer has improved and tweaked things over the last year or two as well. Enough so that when I expanded to Threads and Blue Sky too, a nominal monthly fee rather than free was a good upgrade.

But as I went through the setup for other posts and genres, I realized that I had a few extra features available to me that Buffer has added to the the WP-to-Buffer plugin. In addition to all the normal and automated settings, I can actually go in and say, “Hey for this post, if you get confused at all, use THIS picture as your default”. And I can link to whatever I want to be the image of that post. Sometimes in it, sometimes the featured image (aka the large emoji). Before it was a pain in the butt to make sure it had the right image; now I can just click two spots before I press publish and confirm what I *think* the image should be.

I did it first for my book reviews. I have over 200+ reviews on my site, and often when the first 200 or so were written and shared, it did NOT want to share the book cover as the image. I would have liked it to do so, but often it would flutz on me. But with the improvements in the Buffer service, and the extra features in the app, and some better arrangements by me as well in terms of certain images being uploaded directly to the site as opposed to imported / linked from other sites, I have a bit more control. So somewhere around 20 book reviews or so ago, I was able to directly share the book cover of the book I was reviewing. No muss, no fuss, it shared with my review. Editorial use, for review purposes, if you will. It WORKS.

Enter the quote area

Now, that really doesn’t do anything to solve ALL the problems. As I said before, I had essentially two issues. First, making sure the right image would share in a way that others would see the quote without having to click through i.e., see the quote, not the emoji. That’s working right. Second, I want the quote to be able to be meme-like, BUT I need the text searchable on the website too.

Not surprisingly, I’m not the only website owner that wants this. TONS of people have had similar issues over the years. They want images but they want the text in the images to be searchable. Or they have text that they have is searchable but they want it laid over an image so it LOOKS like a meme on the website but is really text. Except if it is really text, and you share the image, the other websites only share the background image, not the textual overlay. Some sites have gone in for high-end meme generation directly built into the website whic is fine if you have an unlimited bank account to have a really sophisticated website, lots of space, and/or a licensing arrangement with some sort of online meme service. I don’t have any of those.

Soooo, what to do, what to do. I was doing one of the book covers, and the obvious answer hit me over the head twice. I have a very linear filenaming convention for the images — “BR” (for book review) + “######” (the number) + “(title) – (author)”. So in actual fact, even though all of that info shows up in the title of the page, it is also showing up in the text too. Not a great double reinforcement, but better than nothing. The normal solutions that people would use are two-fold — some put the text in the page as either really small font that isn’t visible OR sometimes put the text in and make it white text on a white background, rendering it invisible. Neither of those are sanctioned coding techniques, it’s just laziness from doing it properly.

The REAL way to do it is to put the information in the ALT text box. Except with the plugins I was using, the ALT text was not as easily accessible as I might like. A couple of extra clicks, with a bit of scrolling, to get to the box. Recently, the overall interface for WP itself changed a bit, and voila! I can now SEE the ALT box more easily when I’m typing.

Huh…something is niggling in my brain.

Oh, right. Did the options I have previously not work because of the config I had but now the config would let it happen? Let’s see:

• If I create an image with a quote on it and upload it to my site, I can show the quote with a simple but pretty frame;
• If I take the same text and paste it into the easily available ALT box, it is fully searchable;
• If I go into the Buffer info on the post that I’m creating, and tell the plugin to use the quote image with social media, it will show in the preview when posted; and,
• If people want to share the image, they can — just click and share, with my link going along with it.

I tried it with the first quote in my existing collection, and it lets me make it look like a thumbnail, medium-sized, large-sized or full size. The best image size for most social media is 1600×900 pixels in landscape mode, and that is my custom size for the actual image (I just use PowerPoint). Thumbnail is useless in this instance (wrong dimensions), but any of the other three are fine. On the site, I like the large-size the best. I could add the ALT text to the overall image info in the image manager on the site, but not every plugin reads them the same way compared with manually adding it to the blog post, but that’s a minor inconvenience. It works.

I tested it, as I said, with all the social media sites to see how it would appear and it literally WORKS properly on all four of the ones where I’m active. I couldn’t believe it. Stuff I banged my head on some 4-5 years ago and it suddenly just works more easily.

So what does that all mean for me?

First and foremost, it means I have about 90 quotes to redo. That’s easy enough. I have the PolyWogg Quote of the Day at the top, a “series” branding idea that rolls over from my guides. I will keep my little frog in the bottom corner as my logo with my website address clearly visible. I am debating still if it should be www.polywogg.ca even though it is on ThePolyBlog.ca, but I’ll decide that really soon. And I put a simple little number tracker in the bottom right hand corner (PW Quotes #xxxxx). I’m never going to get to 100,000, but I hope to get above 1,000 sometime, hence five digits.

And I confess that eventually, I want to put ALL of them into a guide. I will consider changing the colour of the daily frame depending on the theme of the quote, and I’ve only done a couple so far. But theoretically the outer frame could be tons of different colours.

Now, here’s where it gets a bit dicey for the future.

Do I want to consider doing the same thing with recipes? Future book reviews? Future movie reviews? Putting them all into a 1600×900 image and sharing it? Rather than the prose I have now?

I don’t know. It would certainly make some of the pieces able to be shared more easily. And if I did it for jokes, that would be highly shareable. Something to think about.

For now? I have 90 quotes to fix.