
One important factor to get OpenPatch going and to spread the word about it
is to talk about it and share content on social media, like Twitter,
Facebook, or Reddit.

Of course, you have to have great content which is of interest to people. But
you also have to present it in such a way that people will click on a shared
link and examine the content in more detail. Therefore, your social media
strategy needs to be on point.

For OpenPatch we will think about our social media strategy first before we
start with our rebuild. We think that building an audience that is interested
in the stuff we do, while we are rebuilding our platform, could be a
Kickstarter.

In the upcoming posts, we will explain what we are doing and planning to do
to build an audience interested in OpenPatch. In this post, we will explain
how we are creating beautiful and appealing social media posts.

---

For social media posts, you need to understand how previews of shared links are created. All big social media networks make use of the [open graph protocol](https://ogp.me/). The open graph protocol basically defines some metatags which need to be placed inside the head of HTML documents. Even though there are many, we will focus on these:

- `og:title` - The title of your object as it should appear within the graph, e.g., "The Rock".
- `og:type` - The type of your object, e.g., "video.movie". Depending on the type you specify, other properties may also be required.
- `og:image` - An image URL which should represent your object within the graph.
- `og:url` - The canonical URL of your object that will be used as its permanent ID in the graph, e.g., "https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0117500/".

For example, for our [Blog](https://openpatch.org/blog) (copy of our dev.to
blog) we know what the title, type, and URL should be. We could also create a
unique image for each blog post and just set the image manually. But we would
like to have a consistent style for the images. Therefore, we have created a
microservice which just creates these images on-the-fly depending on URL
query parameters. It is built on top of [og-image by
vercel](https://github.com/vercel/og-image), but was adapted to fit our
custom style. It supports usernames, avatars,
markdown, and additional icons. Here are two examples:

![Opengraph OpenGraph](https://og.openpatch.org/To%20**Type**%20or%20not%20to%20**Type**%3F%20That%20is%20the%20Question!%20%F0%9F%A4%B7.png?md=1&fontSize=100px&username=mikebarkmin&avatar=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.openpatch.app%2Fstatic%2Fmike_barkmin.jpg&images=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.jsdelivr.net%2Fgh%2Fremojansen%2Flogo.ts%40master%2Fts.svg)

The url for the image looks like this:
[https://og.openpatch.org/To%20**Type**%20or%20not%20to%20**Type**%3F%20That%20is%20the%20Question!%20%F0%9F%A4%B7.png?md=1&fontSize=100px&username=mikebarkmin&avatar=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.openpatch.app%2Fstatic%2Fmike_barkmin.jpg&images=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.jsdelivr.net%2Fgh%2Fremojansen%2Flogo.ts%40master%2Fts.svg](https://og.openpatch.org/To%20**Type**%20or%20not%20to%20**Type**%3F%20That%20is%20the%20Question!%20%F0%9F%A4%B7.png?md=1&fontSize=100px&username=mikebarkmin&avatar=https%3A%2F%2Fblog.openpatch.app%2Fstatic%2Fmike_barkmin.jpg&images=https%3A%2F%2Fcdn.jsdelivr.net%2Fgh%2Fremojansen%2Flogo.ts%40master%2Fts.svg)

What do you think? Would you stop scrolling through social media, if you encounter one of our images?

You can find the source code of the open graph microservice here: https://github.com/openpatch/og-image
You can test out the open graph microservice here: https://og.openpatch.org/


Social Media plays a huge role in promoting a new platform. Therefore, shared links should be beautiful and appealing. This can be done by using the open graph protocol.


[Devlog #002] Social First!


Before we start with our journey in rewriting OpenPatch, we want to discuss
one important issue first: How to get the community involved?

The old codebase of OpenPatch is currently hosted on GitLab
(https://gitlab.com/openpatch). Even though GitLab is a great platform and we
love the integration of pipelines and the container registry, we are not
feeling the connection to the community. Simple things like not being able to
get involved in the Hacktoberfest (https://hacktoberfest.digitalocean.com/)
are a real bummer. Also, many possible contributors are not on GitLab and
therefore are more hesitant to contribute.

By moving away from GitLab to GitHub we are hoping to get the community more
involved. Also with the introduction of GitHub Actions and GitHub Packages,
which are comparable to GitLab pipelines and container registry, we are
probably not missing out on many usability aspects.

If you want to know more about the reasoning behind our move to GitHub or our
experience with GitLab, feel free to leave a comment.

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Moving away from GitLab to gain more benefits from the GitHub community.


[Devlog #001] Moving Away From GitLab


During the last years, we have developed an open platform for assessment and
training of skills. We started with a simple idea. We just wanted to have an
online platform, which we could use for our research projects. Over time the
idea grew and new features were added to the platform. Instead of just
beginning a private platform for our studies, we have opened it to also be a
social network for sharing tasks and tests. Even though we have started with
a microservice architecture and could adapt to many new requirements, we
think it is time to rewrite the entire platform. This should help us to focus
on our vision, which has formed the last years. To document the process we
will try to write these Devlogs from time to time. These will not be
tutorials but rather a documentation about the rewrite. They could be
focussing on technical decisions, on design discussion, present
architectures, or focus on rather small problems we will encounter by
rewriting OpenPatch.

So if you are interested in seeing how this rewrite is processing over the
next months, be sure to follow us.

If you want to see the current code base of OpenPatch, which is built around
Flask, MariaDB, and NextJS be sure to check out our GitLab-Repository
https://gitlab.com/openpatch.


Rewriting OpenPatch from scratch. Let's get started.


[Devlog #002] Social First!

[Devlog #001] Moving Away From GitLab

[Devlog #000] A New Beginning