Shortlist Story Map Beta Description Hyperlinks

[JustinSmith]

Hello,

In the Shortlist Story Map Beta banner I would like to add Facebook and Twitter hyperlinks to the description of my map in the form of their icons.  The reason I want to do it in the description is because I am told with the out-of-the box story map hosted in AGOL, the Facebook and Twitter links in this map are not editable; they allow you to share the map but will not allow me to provide my own hyperlink to our own Facebook and Twitter pages through them.  See attached as there isn’t an option to change it. 

The customer would much rather have the Facebook and Twitter icons bring the public to the sites as opposed to a text hyperlink. 

Is it possible to code in the icons?  Example of what description is now:

Be sure to visit our <a href="https://twitter.com/YYCArtsCulture" style="color: red; outline: none;" target=" _blank">Twitter </a> page for further interaction.

Thanks,

Justin

[RupertEssinger · Accepted solution]

Hi Justin

Thanks for the note. The behavior of the Twitter and Facebook links in the Shortlist banner/header can't be changed via the Builder. So if someone tweets your Shortlist via that Twitter button, we generate a default Tweet and after tweeting the 'who to follow' suggestion they'll see will be the EsriStoryMaps account. (The most flexible Story Map app in this regard is Story Map Crowdsource, which lets you specify the tweet text and the Who To Follow accounts as a setting in the Builder). You can however tailor those properties in Shortlist and other Story Map apps by downloading and self-hosting the open-source app code, and customizing that part of the code.  If you're interested in exploring this option we recently published an article about how to host your own story map. There is also an article about improving the appearance of self-hosted apps on social media by tweaking the meta tags. For example, for many of the story maps that the Esri Story Maps team publishes,like The Lands We Share: America's Protected Areas  we hosted the app code on our own web server so that we can make any tweaks we like, and improving the appearance of the default Twitter card is one of those tweaks we usually do. For example paste that story's URL into the Twitter Card Validator to see the large image we use: https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator 

This is an area we would like to enhance in the Story Map apps in some new development we are planning because people are asking for it, and social media is obviously a key platform on which story maps are shared, promoted and discovered.

Rupert