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165 points talljohnson1234 | 1 comments | | HN request time: 0.209s | source

Hey HN,

I’ve been an indie hacker for a while, but I haven’t had much success with my past projects. Recently, I came across Marc Lou’s advice about building free tools just for fun, so I decided to give it a shot.

I built Metacheck, a simple tool that lets you preview how any link will appear on Twitter/X, LinkedIn, Whatsapp, Telegram, and other platforms. No API keys, no setup—just paste a link and see the preview.

Why I built this I often ran into issues where social platforms displayed broken or unexpected link previews. Debugging Open Graph meta tags was annoying, so I made a tool to make it easier.

How it works Fetches metadata from any URL Parses Open Graph & Twitter Card tags Shows real-time previews of how the link will look when shared

Try it out: https://metacheck.appstate.co/

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bryanhogan ◴[] No.43374067[source]
Can anyone tell me why WhatsApp seems so random whether it display the social preview image and text or not? E.g. for my own website https://bryanhogan.com/ it shows up in the tool but not in actual chats.
replies(3): >>43374375 #>>43375466 #>>43376973 #
1. leonhard ◴[] No.43376973[source]
I just tried your URL on my WhatsApp and it shows up exactly as in the preview from the tool. My experience is is has to be the full URL with https:// and it only shows the first link, and it sometimes gets confused when you have multiple links in a message and shuffle them around/delete some of them.