Guides, honest comparisons, and engineering notes from the team turning URLs into images.
Launch morning. Containers up, heartbeat green, API returning 504s. A postmortem of the config bug that started our worker with zero concurrency — three reasonable-looking layers that each said nothing, together saying everything.
Read the post →A social card is a snapshot of your data — and your data doesn't hold still. Prices change, podcast episodes ship, job posts close. How signed image URLs turn OG images into a function of your data instead of a file you babysit.
Read the post →Every link preview you've ever seen — Slack, X, LinkedIn, iMessage — is an Open Graph image. One reference for the tags, the 1200×630 rule, the X crop math, the LinkedIn WebP trap, and the point where automation beats hand-making them.
Read the post →@vercel/og generates social cards from JSX with no browser at all — genuinely fast, genuinely free, genuinely limited. A precise map of where the CSS subset ends (grid, calc, WOFF2, real URLs) and an honest look at when each tool wins.
Read the post →The Puppeteer script worked yesterday afternoon. Here are the four hundred lines you haven't written yet — the ones that keep it alive in production — plus an honest account of when writing them yourself is the right call.
Read the post →Every post deserves a social card, and nobody wants to hand-make them at 11pm. The full n8n recipe: install the Shotium node, point it at your RSS feed, and choose between rendered binaries and zero-cost signed URLs.
Read the post →A screenshot API takes URLs from strangers and opens them inside your infrastructure. Blocklists are the easy 20% — what actually bites is IP-literal obfuscation, IPv4-mapped IPv6, and DNS rebinding. This is the three-layer guard we run in production.
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