19th & 20th Century Social Media Optimization

Using Twitter Cards and Facebook OpenGraph to make The New York Times Archive Sociable

Evan Sandhaus Director Search, Archives, Semantics

The New York Times @kansandhaus

On Today’s Menu

•  Preliminaries •  Meet The Archive •  Meet TimesMachine •  Our Approach to Social Media

Optimization •  Complexities

(me)

Meet The Archive

≈59,000 Issues Published Since

September 18, 1851

1851 1980

Deep Archive

1981 2014

Modern Archive

0!

45000!

90000!

135000!

180000!

225000!Scanned Articles! Digital Articles! Blogs!

0!

45000!

90000!

135000!

180000!

225000!Scanned Articles! Digital Articles! Blogs!

≈75% ≈25%

46,592 Issues Published Since

September 18, 1851

2,335,446 Unique Pages Printed Since

September 18, 1851

11,298,320 Articles Published Since

September 18, 1851

At 9, he settled a dispute with a pistol. At 13, he lit out for the Amazon jungle.

At 20, he attempted suicide-by-jaguar. Afterward he

was apprenticed to a pirate… …

Mr. Fairfax was among the last avatars of a centuries-old figure: the lone-wolf explorer, whose exploits are conceived to satisfy few but himself.

His was a solitary, contemplative art that has been all but lost amid the contrived derring-do of

adventure-based reality television.

But here’s the thing… We don’t want TimesMachine Showing up in Search!

<meta name="robots" content="noindex" />

Traffic Sources

•  nytimes.com •  NYTimes.com site search

•  Direct •  Social Media •  3rd Party Content Sites

The Magic

The Magic

What We Support

•  Twitter •  twitter:card •  twitter:site •  twitter:title •  twitter:image •  twitter:description •  twitter:url

•  Facebook •  fb:app_id •  og:title •  og:type •  og:image •  og:description •  og:url

The Complexities •  Creating preview images. •  Facebook Recommends

•  1200 x 630 (preferred) •  600 x 315 (accepted) •  >(600 x 315) small preview

•  Twitter Recommends •  >(120 x 120) •  Cropped to 4:3 (120 x 90) on expanded tweet and

details page. •  Kept at square resolution on embedded tweet

page.

The Complexities •  Twitter and Facebook don’t seem to

process JavaScript when generating previews.

•  URLs often change without page reload.

•  Your site must be smart enough to generate correct metadata based on url alone.

Thank You! @NYTArchives