Busy.org improve meta-description for sharing on social

Note: Small enhancement tested, merged, working on a build issue to go live.

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In the last weeks I've started blogging using Busy.org more. I often find I want to share an article to other friends via other sites and messengers, whether Telegram, Facebook, Twitter, ect.

The previews on these images are generated from meta-data on the Busy page:

To me it is somewhat annoying how the text gets cut off at the end. Notice how it says "I guess I should be eating a I by kirkins"? In some cases this actually made it look like I had a typo in my article. Which is annoying when you're trying to get people to click through to your blog.

My solution was to create a new summary function which either returns 140 characters plus ... or if less than 141 charachters in length simply return all the text without a ....

export function postSummary(post, author) {
  let formattedPost = post.substring(0, 140);
  if (post.length > 140) formattedPost += '...';
  formattedPost += ` by ${author}`;
  return formattedPost;
}

The above would result in "I guess I should be eating a I... by kirkins" instead of the original without the ....

I was able to run this change locally and also as a Heroku instance generated by Busy. That instance was tested, approved, and merged.

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Unfortunately, later I found out there was some sort of build issue surrounding the change.

I've looked into the build a bit but I'll probably need some assistance from someone at Busy.

Here is me building a fresh master:

git clone https://github.com/busyorg/busy
cd busy
yarn install
yarn run build
yarn start

When I run that I get Busy seems to be running on localhost:3000 but I get back the following in my terminal:

[nodemon] 1.14.11
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: busy.server.js
[nodemon] starting `node busy.server.js`
SSR error occured, falling back to bundled application instead Error: Request has timed out. It should take no longer than 5000ms.
    at Timeout._onTimeout (/tmp/busy/busy.server.js:9:32268)
    at ontimeout (timers.js:475:11)
    at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:310:5)
    at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:270:5)

With my changed branch I do:

git clone https://github.com/kirkins/busy 
cd busy
git checkout cut_description
yarn install
yarn run build
yarn start

With this the application also seems to be running at localhost:3000 I get back some slightly different output but nothing that helps me to see a problem with my specific change.

[nodemon] 1.14.11
[nodemon] to restart at any time, enter `rs`
[nodemon] watching: busy.server.js
[nodemon] starting `node busy.server.js`
Unable to find New Relic module configuration. A default
configuration file can be copied from /tmp/busy/node_modules/newrelic/lib/config.default.js
and put at /tmp/busy/newrelic.js. If you are not using file based config
please set the environment variable NEW_RELIC_NO_CONFIG_FILE=true
{"v":0,"level":30,"name":"newrelic_bootstrap","hostname":"philip-ThinkPad-T420","pid":5719,"time":"2018-03-28T14:57:37.597Z","msg":"Using New Relic for Node.js. Agent version: 1.40.0; Node version: v8.9.4."}
Unable to find New Relic module configuration. A default
configuration file can be copied from /tmp/busy/node_modules/newrelic/lib/config.default.js
and put at /tmp/busy/newrelic.js. If you are not using file based config
please set the environment variable NEW_RELIC_NO_CONFIG_FILE=true
{"v":0,"level":30,"name":"newrelic_bootstrap","hostname":"philip-ThinkPad-T420","pid":5719,"time":"2018-03-28T14:57:37.601Z","msg":"Module not enabled in configuration; not starting."}
SSR error occured, falling back to bundled application instead Error: Request has timed out. It should take no longer than 5000ms.
    at Timeout._onTimeout (/tmp/busy/busy.server.js:1:1484124)
    at ontimeout (timers.js:475:11)
    at tryOnTimeout (timers.js:310:5)
    at Timer.listOnTimeout (timers.js:270:5)

There is a slight difference in output but this is only related to a 3rd party logging system. Other than that the behavior in terminal and browser seems the exact same with and without my change.

So at this point it is difficult for my to progress with the build issue without getting more information from 9m90m.

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Another small change in this commit, changing the meta-data for the Twitter account associated with the website, was previously pointing to @steemit:

<meta property="twitter:site" content={'@busyorg'} />

I'm actually not sure what the end effect of this is when it comes to users sharing Busy links on Twitter. If you know let me know in the comments!

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Update: based on a comment from @fel1xw I have made a new PR using lodash to get the ball rolling on fixing the build issue and having this enhancement go live. Thanks for that.

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Posted on Utopian.io - Rewarding Open Source Contributors

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