99 Park Row

At LexBlog, we pride ourselves on being a platform. It’s a move we made now more than a decade ago. We don’t design and develop every blog individually. We built, in effect, a blog-builder—and continue to add to it.

The additions continue—and honestly, may pick up the pace.

First up: LB Social Cards.

The fun thing about this new feature is we’re able to do this because of the work we’ve put in already. We’ve programmatically laid out the various elements of a law blog in a very specific way—from the colors to fonts to the firm logo to the featured image and so on. So, if we need to call on them to use them for something else, we can.

And we did.

As developer Angelo Carosio wrote on recently, Open Graph images are an increasingly-important component of a blog. Or, really, any piece of online content.

They’re the images you see when you share a link on a social media platform, or even in iMessage. More often than not, it’s the first impression a reader gets of your blog. And we’re going to make it better.

Here’s an early peek at a few examples of how this will look:

While these will look nice and eye-catching fluttering down any social media feed, they’re especially useful on Twitter, which truncates all but the shortest headlines. Lawyers do not have the shortest headlines.

For example, here’s an individual post’s Twitter preview with and without this new feature.

Here it is without:

LexBlog goes out of its way to create custom Open Graph images for blogs—fallbacks that exist and are called upon when a post doesn’t have an image. But it’s just one image for every post.

With the feature flipped on, every single post gets an Open Graph image tailored to it, like this:

Potential readers on social can quickly and easily see the whole title—even if it’s 22 words long. Pretty nifty, huh?

When can LexBlog users expect to see this on their blog? Real soon. As is the case with all new features, our Enterprise users have first access, and contacts at those firms will receive communications shortly.

We’ll also have a Support Center article up with details users need to know with regards to optimizing them, and then how to channel feedback.

If you want to reach out to me personally with any thoughts or questions, don’t hesitate doing so. If you don’t have my email, it’s just my first name at LexBlog dot com. Talk soon.