I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.
LinkedIn is by far the worst offender in post previews. The doctype tag must be all lowercase. The HTML document must be well-formed (the meta tags must be in an explicit <head> block, for example). You must have OG meta tags for url, title, type, and image. The url meta tag gets visited, even if it's the same address the inspector is already looking at.
Fortunately, the post inspector helps you suss out what's missing in some cases, but c'mon, man, how much effort should I spend helping a social media site figure out how to render a preview? Once you get it right, and to quote my 13 year old: "We have arrived, father... but at what cost?"
This brings back memories. I developed the "JoTrivia" mIRC script back around 2000/2001 as a way to kill time when I worked nighttime tech support and got maybe two calls a night. The scripting language syntax was completely bonkers, e.g.,
on *:JOIN:%jt.triv.chan:{ .notice $nick Welcome $nick! }
Loads of fun, though, and IRC was nice venue back then to build a community out of strangers who had similar blocks of free time.
I wrote a Spirograph clone that worked on an iPhone as a Christmas present for my 6 year old, mainly because back then I couldn't find any existing clones where you could drag the gears around to draw, and I thought it would be a fun coding exercise.
It got me over the line in a job interview at the first startup I worked for. Spirographs and toy web apps had nothing to do with the job, but it was a quick way to demonstrate "chops" to the engineering team, in what was otherwise a disaster of an all-day interview.
I was sick, and tried to reschedule the interview, but the company had planned their whole day around me being there, and the CEO was going to travel for vacation afterwards. I put on a brave face and talked with the CEO, then the tech founders, but I was becoming more and more listless as the day went on.
The engineering team took me out for lunch and beers. We sat outside, and I was facing the sun, feeling like hell, and after the first beer I was in no way able to think technically. Rather than invert a binary tree, or whatever they were asking me about, I shifted the conversation to kids and apps, and passed my phone around for them to all play with the Pufftygraph controls and draw some hypotrochoids.
Some combination of sympathy for someone obviously dead on their feet but still trying, and the app, was enough to get my foot in the door. I had a good time there, but if I had it to do over again, I would have just cancelled since they were so inflexible. Now in the post-covid world, the idea of inviting someone sick to breathe all over your team for a day sounds insane.
I tried AoC out one year with the Wolfram language, which sounds insane now, but back then it was just a "seemed like the thing to do at the time" and I'm glad I did it.