Dynamic Link Previews for Linking Things
When I decided to create a custom theme for my blog I decided I wanted to take over the share preview images that micro.blog generates by default. I didn’t find any of the options really appealing to me so I decided to build my own cards service that is a lightweight Lambda function that serves preview images exactly how I want them. I quickly realized I could use this for more than just my blog and I could embed custom logic for different sites I wanted to use it for.
Today I moved Linking Things to a 3D spatial galaxy view of my 16,500+ links I’ve collected. I love it. If you want, load the site and hit the “full screen” button and you just fly around from site to site in my bookmarks.
I decided to create a custom share preview for the site that actually uses the graph data that the site is built off of and shows real data about how the link is connected. I just had to share these examples. You can link from each to the actual link on the site.
The whole sky. This is the base every other card is lit against: every link since 2005 and nothing lit, just the topic glows under the stars.
An issue: Weekly Thing 354, “A museum for nnxyz art”. Its 23 links are scattered across the whole sky, because one issue reaches into many subjects. The issue number and date sit on top, the subject is the headline, and the count is in the pill.
A topic: AI agents. Its links sit close together in meaning, so the view zooms right in on one corner of the sky and the stars draw bigger. Put it next to WT354 to show “spread out” against “clustered”.
A year: 2025. All 1,076 links are lit and the sky is mostly gold. The more stars a card lights, the smaller each one draws, so a year’s thousand don’t blur together.
A site: kottke.org. This shows one source’s range: lights in most corners of the sky, with a bright knot in the middle. Sites get no count.
On this day: October 31. Links saved on this date in every year since 2005, lit together. It changes each day, so it suits a post dated today.
I so love it. A little detail that most people probably wont even notice but is amazing.