For those who engage in any sort of IT world, or anything that comes with a manual, the general joke is that 90% of all problems would be eliminated if you just “read the f***ing manual” (RTFM).

A few weeks ago, I noted that I had solved a chron problem with my website. Well, to be candid, the chron problem apparently solved itself, upgraded itself beyond its own obsolescence, or it just evaporated as a problem. Whereas I had problems previously where things I told it to post at say noon wouldn’t post at noon, or even at all until someone refreshed the website thus triggering an update, the chron suddenly started working. If I scheduled something for 12:30 p.m., it would publish at 12:30 p.m. It I said, 4:30 p.m., it would go at 4:30 p.m. More importantly, if I scheduled things so one would publish at 8:30 a.m., one at 12:30 p.m., and one at 4:30 p.m., AND had it go to my Buffer app to share things to social media at 9:00, 1:00 and 5:00, then lo and behold (!), it would indeed publish on time and Buffer would post it to media as per its separate schedule.

So I went back to looking at quotes and humour, and figured out a way to post them as pictures / images, with the text in the ALT area so it would still get indexed (i.e., if a joke refers to nuns, but the joke was a picture not text, a search for the word nuns would NOT pull up the page; if instead, I also add the text to the ALT text for the image, it will indeed find the word and show me the relevant post).

So why does all that matter?

Because before Chron was working and before I had images to share, I basically had to do things manually. If I wanted to post at 9:00, I had to go online and post at 9:00. If I wanted to post at 1:00 p.m., I had to go online and post. Otherwise, the people who subscribe to my website (rather than on social media) would get all the posts at once. Soooo, if I pre-posted a month’s worth of quotes? They would all go out at once by email. Not the best plan. Instead, I generally held myself to one post per day, and let it go out by email at whatever time but would tweak the settings in Buffer so it would look right. One day ahead. If I was too tired the night before, nothing went out.

Yet I’ve always had a bit of a challenge with sharing images with my posts to social media. From a WordPress site, there are essentially three possible images to choose from:

1. The featured image (FI) aka usually a smallish image next to your post … because of the way I designed my layout, the FI image sits outside of the main text to the left above the date;
2. An image embedded somewhere in the text; or,
3. An image embedded in the text and tagged with OPENGRAPH settings as an image to share.

Some social media sites have a priority of 1, 3, 2 for which image it will choose; others will do 3, 1, 2; and still others will do 2, 3, 1. There has been some challenge at times sharing what I want to share. I also don’t have some big IT department to figure this out for me. Because my FI photos sometimes are the ONLY photos in a post, I want it to use that image if there aren’t any others. When I do book reviews, I also include a copy of the book cover — usually category 2 above. On occasion, I insert other images and depending on how they are embedded, sometimes they use OPENGRAPH tags and sometimes not. Sigh.

Now, things get a bit more interesting. I mentioned above that I use Buffer as an online app that takes my posts from the WordPress site and acts as an intermediary with various social media sites — Facebook/Meta; Twitter/X; BlueSky; and Threads. And then gives me a fourth place to store photos for the post, ideally for sharing with social media.

I was struggling to get the right image to show up, and I frequently would still have to go in and edit the Buffer queue so that the right image would show. I would put in the photo I wanted into the #4 slot, but it wouldn’t show in the post. I read the text that went with it multiple times, and it didn’t seem to apply to what I wanted.

Ultimately, with this plugin, I now had FOUR places to put a photo and then four possible settings for the actual sharing to social media, so 16 combinations in all. I wasn’t looking forward to trying them all, to be honest. I had tweaked something last week to make my ThePolyBlog site look like what was posting from PolyWogg.ca, but it made it worse, not better. The quotes and humour “images” were no longer showing as previews in FaceBook — it was just the featured image (FI), so if anyone wanted to see the joke or quote, they had to click through to see it. Exactly what I was trying to avoid — I wanted the image versions to be more easily shared than forcing a click-through.

I decided to do a bit of work on it on Sunday night, and I figured the best option had to be somewhere in Option 4. It’s a separate area, as I said, where you can tell WP that these are the photos you want to share. And in fact, it is designed to share multiple photos, maybe even a little mini-gallery if you want. It wasn’t limited to one photo.

There was some generic text about adding images, but it recently updated the language on the screen. It now says:

The first image only replaces the Featured Image in a status where a status’ option is not set to “Use OpenGraph Settings”. Additional images only work where a status’ option is set to “Use Featured Image, not Linked to Post”.

I read that text a couple of dozen times over recent weeks and it was not really jiving. For sentence two, it’s talking about “additional” images but I didn’t have any additional images, I was just putting in one. Sometimes it took it, sometimes not. For the first sentence, you may notice that it is kind of badly worded.

While it says the first image replaces the FI when it is NOT set to “use OG settings”, but so what? I don’t really care if it replaces the FI when it isn’t set to that, I want it set to that. Don’t I? But then it hit me that the two sentences sort of work together.

My general posts have a Featured Image. The Open Graph settings are designed to add OG codes/tags to the Featured Image. So it should use FI and OG. Great. Except you have to change the settings from using OG to something where it is NOT using OG. Wait, what? Oh yeah, that’s the second phrase. If you set it to use an FI that is NOT the main FI linked to the post, then it will use the first image saved here in this box.

So while every website advice about sharing images says to use the regular FI and add the OG settings, this one tells me to NOT use the FI, not use the OG settings, and to use a different setting that doesn’t sound right at all. It goes against everything obvious in the approach. But, ultimately, it totally overrides letting the social media sites decide between #1-3 and tells it, regardless of what else is going on, just use whatever image I tell it to use in this setting (#4).

Bam! All four of my social media posts shared perfectly the next time. A book review with a cover, a quote as an image, and a joke as an image. All three “images” shared as the main pic with their posts x 4 different sites.

Because I RTFM, apparently. It’s not just a meme. The manual makes no SENSE, but that’s beside the point. It’s fixed.