When people submit stories from your blog on to social sites like Digg or Facebook, they also have to choose a thumbnail image that should go along with that link. These thumbnails are often generated automatically from pictures that are found in the corresponding web page or blog post.
Giving choice to the story submitter is good but can sometimes lead to irrelevant or even humorous choice of thumbnails. To prevent this, you can actually decide (or force) the exact thumbnail image that should be displayed next to your stories that either shared on Digg or Facebook.
To put your choice of thumbnail, simply to include an additional <link> tag in the <head> portion of your blog template that points to the URL of the appropriate thumbnail image as shown here.
<meta name="title" content="Digital Inspiration" /> <meta name="description" content="Technology and Software Blog" /> <link rel="image_src" href="http://www.labnol.org/screenshot.png" />
You may already have the <meta> description tag in your blog template but make sure that you also add the <meta> title tag for blog thumbnails to work. The <meta> title can have the same value as the actual <title> tag of your web pages.
You can see a working implementation of this on Winer’s photo blog at FlickrFan. The thumbnail link element is supported by Digg, Facebook and FriendFeed. See: Bootstrapping Thumbnails.
Google and Blog Thumbnails
Steve Rubel earlier discovered that Google displayed thumbnail images next to search results that pointed to WordPress blogs.
That experiment was for a short period but there’s a possibility that, in future, Google (and other search engines) could use the URL sharing standard discussed above to discover thumbnails associated with a particular blog post and display them in search results.
Find this article at: http://www.labnol.org/internet/design/set-thumbnail-images-for-web-pages/6482/
Tags: Archives, digg, facebook, friendfeed, thumbnail, Web Design
Reader Comments
I think this would be very useful for WP designer as they can integrate this feature into their themes. But I am wondering that this would make our blogs slower and slower.
Written by Tinh on 01.13.09
I hope the thumbnails on search result is not on all results. The algorithm should wisely choose which of the results should show thumbnails.
Written by charles palma on 01.13.09
How to add thumbnail in Blogger (each post)? any idea?
Ukion
Written by ukion on 01.13.09
Will this tweak change the images that already alexa and technorati have on their sites..?
Written by Arun Basil Lal on 01.13.09
@tinh – this involves adding another line in the HEADER tag of your HTML page. Why should this make a site slow?
@ukion – I don’t know if it is possible to include dynamic META tags in blogger templates.
@arun – Alexa and Technorati use the thumbnail image of main site and not individual pages.
Written by Amit on 01.13.09