Defining Twitter Cards in your Jekyll Template

Twitter cards are a great way to have your content highlighted when Twitted. There are a few formats available, with Summary /w Large Image being my favorite. Here’s how I defined it in Jekyll in my head.html include file:

<meta name="twitter:card" content="summary_large_image">
<meta name="twitter:site" content="@alligatorio">
<meta name="twitter:title" content="{{ page.title }}">

{% if page.description %}
  <meta name="twitter:description"
    content="{{ page.meta_description }}">
{% else %}
  <meta name="twitter:description"
    content="{{ page.content | strip_html | xml_escape
      | truncate: 200 }}">
{% endif %}

A few notes

If there’s no meta description defined for the page, we pull the first 200 words of the post using some Jekyll template filters. Thanks to Paul Stamatiou for the trick. If there’s no thumbnail defined for the post, we pull a general cover image for the site.

You’ll obviously want to change the twitter:site to reflect the Twitter handle for your site. If needed, you can also define a twitter:creator with the content set to the Twitter handle of the author of the specific post. Maybe for this you could see if an author is defined in the Jekyll Front Matter for the post.

Validating your cards

You can use this tool to validate your Twitter cards. For the Summary Card with Large Image type, twitter:card, twitter:site, twitter:title and twitter:description are required.