With the static embedding, I wanted to remove all requirements for JavaScript and remove all third-party requests on behalf of the users here. In short, this speeds things up and saves you from worrying about cookies & tracking or needing to make exceptions to the site’s CSP.
The downside is that it’s a cludge of bash script, JavaScript, Puppeteer, Go, and HTML on the backend. At least nobody else sees that.
It loads the embedded version of the post in Chromium, takes a time-stamped screenshot, extracts the post content, and creates an image embedded with an alt-tag using a truncated part of the post content. And, links to the post for maximum PageRank, of course. The images & text content are stored in the site’s static directory, making serving easy.
Sample toot/post
The full code is on GitHub.
