Blog Social Cross-Posting

The Heat Index post editor can publish a blog article's full content to your connected social channels — not just the Open Graph link card the on-page share buttons produce. Check the channels you want in the editor's Cross-post to social panel and the article is posted to them.

How it works

The feature reuses the platform's existing social publishing engine (lib/social/publisher.ts), the same one behind /admin/social. When you cross-post an article, a single SocialMediaPost is created and linked to the blog post (via SocialMediaPost.blogPostId, which is unique). Repeated saves or "Cross-post now" clicks reuse that one record, so the per-account idempotency guard prevents the same article being posted twice to the same channel.

What gets posted

A social feed post can't render the article's HTML (headings, bold, images interleaved with prose), so the body is converted from Markdown into the closest faithful plain text:

• Paragraphs and line breaks are preserved.
• Bullet and numbered lists are kept (- / * become •).
• Headings and bold/italic/code markers are stripped to their text.
• Links become text (url).
• The [[youtube:…]], [[vimeo:…]] and [[video:…]] embeds become plain URLs.
• Inline images are dropped from the text — the article's picture is carried by the link preview card instead.

The post is the article title, optional subtitle, then the converted body, with a link back to …/heat-index/<slug> attached.

The link preview image

Facebook builds the preview card from its own cached scrape of the article URL: since Graph API v2.9 a post cannot specify the card's picture, so whatever the page's og:image says when Facebook reads it is what everyone sees, for weeks. Two things keep that honest.

The article's share image is chosen in this order:

1. The cover image, which is what the field is for — set it if you care which picture shows up.
2. The first gallery image, for a post laid out as a gallery.
3. The first image in the body, so an article that only ever embedded its picture in the prose still shares that picture.
4. The site's default Open Graph image, only when the article has no picture at all.

And publishing, editing or cross-posting a post clears its cached page and asks Facebook to re-read the link right before the post goes out, so the card is built from the article as it stands rather than from an earlier render of it.

An article shared before this was in place keeps whatever card Facebook already cached. To correct one, re-run the cross-post, or paste the URL into Facebook's Sharing Debugger and press Scrape Again.

Eligible channels

Only channels that accept a text-plus-link post are offered:

Instagram and TikTok are intentionally excluded — their publishing APIs require an uploaded image or video, which a text article doesn't provide.

Channels come from the accounts connected under Social at /admin/social. Connect the Facebook Page you want to post to there first (for example the josemadridsalsainc Page); it then appears as a checkbox in the editor.

Using it

1. Open or create a post in Admin → Blog → Posts.
2. In the Cross-post to social panel, check the channels to post to. The connected Facebook Page(s) are pre-selected by default.
3. On publish — checked channels are posted to automatically when the post transitions to Published, alongside the subscriber notification email.
4. On demand — use Cross-post now to post immediately (for example to an already-published article, or to retry a channel that failed). The panel shows each channel's status and a link to the live post.

Twitter failures

X blog cross-posts send text and the article link. Cover images attached for Google Business are not uploaded to X. Failed X responses show the HTTP status and API error when available. If X returns an empty or invalid response, check the account on X before retrying to avoid duplicating a post that may have been accepted.

Permissions

Cross-posting is gated on the content:write permission — the same permission the blog editor already requires — so a content admin can cross-post without the broader social_media:* permissions. Account connection and app credentials are still managed under /admin/social.