Og-image: Technical Discussion
The Idea
I was inspired by Vercel’s opengraph image generator but didn’t want to paste their logo over everything (especially because I dont use vercel), and I was not happy with their options for images, so I decided to clone it. It provides a simple endpoint (called data.png) with not GET arguments so it will always work with social media platforms.
The Features (or planned features)
- Simple generator UI
- Several selectable backgrounds
- Input for title, subtitle, URL, and URL Protocol
- Live preview with image and code sample
The tech stack
Frontend:
- HTML
- JavaScript
- CSS
Backend:
- Node.js (express)
- DigitalOcean App Platform
What happened
This is a live and evolving project, I made it primarily for myself but figured I may as well make it availble to the world. After a few months, OG-Image Generator now sees over 100,000 generations per month for over 6,000 unique domains. I have partnered with Webcode Tools to help market the service, and that has become my primary source of user acquisition.
In my opinion, this is the coolest project I have ever built. It is not a huge technical achievement, but I am extremely proud to have become a part of the ecosystem for so many developers and websites. This project is offered for 100% free, and I am happy to see it being used by so many people.
This project was originally deployed to DigitalOcean’s App Platform but i later migrated to Kubernetes (still on DigitalOcean. ❤️ u digitalocean!) so I could run multiple projects on the same cluster with the redundancy, scalability, and uptime that Kubernetes provides. Although I cannot say I understand even 1% of what Kubernetes has to offer, I am slowly picking up more and adding more complexity as my projects warrant it.
