POV: You're officially a startup because you paid your first business expense. 😂💸

First, my post got removed because I didn't ask the admins for permission. 😅 Lesson learned the hard way.

Now I've done it properly first business expense: promoting Min Ale Zare. 🚀

almost 200👀

📊 User Stats

Total users: 199
New Users today: 6
Active today: 13

📊 User Stats

Total users: 200
New Users today: 7
Active today: 14

Color synesthesia is a condition where certain sounds trigger the perception of colors. When she hears music, she sees colors and as an artist, she paints what she sees. That's so cool.

🎉 Biggest day yet!

🆕 33 new users today
🔥 56 active users

This is our best day so far. Thanks for being part of it let's keep the momentum going! 🚀

Telegram Link Preview Journey

Today's rabbit hole from Min Ale Zare: Telegram link previews.
🕳

I was trying to get proper link previews working when someone shares an
event. I knew this would've been much easier if I'd started with
Next.js... but I don't like Next.js, so I built it with React instead.
😅

Turns out Telegram (and most social platforms) doesn't run your React
app. Its scraper just fetches the HTML and reads the Open Graph meta
tags already in it:

- og:title -- preview title
- og:description -- description
- og:image -- thumbnail
- og:url -- page URL
- og:type -- content type
- og:site_name -- your site's name

Since React is client-side, the scraper only sees the tags in
index.html, not the dynamic ones React renders later.

I didn't want to migrate Min Ale Zare to Next.js just for this, so I
ended up using Vercel Edge Functions as middleware to inject the
correct meta tags before the HTML is returned. It turned out to be a
pretty nice middle ground.

all of this so i can have links like
https://min-ale-zare.vercel.app/event/c5fba97e-0774-4dad-ae69-b502142a0c6b?ref=9b7cce64-8ae5-43de-a400-3c5aecd76e98

This article helped point me in the right direction:
https://nickconfrey.medium.com/how-to-add-dynamic-meta-tags-to-react-app-for-seo-5ce64f2ff902

If you've solved this in a cleaner way without SSR or moving to Next.js,
I'd love to hear about it.