Improve SEO/meta tags of root level sessionizer pages

[experimatt]

Reported by Martin Grider. See Minnestar slack thread for more details:

Not a huge issue, but here’s the “unfurl” for the sessionizer: https://sessions.minnestar.org/home

Because the image is transparent, the Minne is totally washed out on my screen. Additionally, there’s not really much information there. I’d love to see the date of the event at the very least.

To provide some guidance, I believe this preview data comes from Open Graph: https://ogp.me/

Looks like someone implemented some twitter meta tags at some point… can we update the template to use the og: equivalents? Also, I think the logo would be a better image. Maybe this is something I could even do in a PR!

eh, I could make a PR, but I wouldn’t be able to test it locally. I did find the file in question, which looks to be app/views/layouts/application.html.erb.Also, it looks like some of the fields are being populated from the database. For instance, the description is just “Minnebar”, and that’s populated with a template variable named meta_description. If it were me, I’d change that to something like: “Minnebar 19 is a participant-led unconference free and open to all. It’ll be held on Saturday, May 3rd, 2025, 8:00 am – 6:30 pm CDT.”I would also change the og:image to point to the logo. Probably this one: https://sessions.minnestar.org/assets/logos/minnebar-horizontal-f1ffcbbec9d5647524e98184f63cd9fc8dd0e41e069af623b7793f778e081781.svg But it looks like assets are also template variables, so maybe the line would become:

<meta name="og:image" content="<%= image_url 'logos/minnebar-horizontal.svg' %>">

(TBH, I wasn’t sure how to add the directory name in there. Not exactly sure why that logo is the only file in a subdirectory. 😛)

[experimatt]

#351 addresses this, using a static image and meta tag values, which will temporarily solve this problem for this year. But we'll need to come back to this to make it more sustainable longer-term.

1. As it stands now, we'll need to update the static image every year, unless we figure out a way to dynamically generate the text overlaying the image.
2. We can and should be able to pull data from Event.current_event to populate the meta tags for use with these root-level meta tags.

[experimatt]

#355 made the meta description content dynamic.