@ricmac Is this close enough to your backyard?
@treitnauer
https://twitter.com/treitnauer/status/876980277104463872

@billbennettnz You should be able to use https://cards-dev.twitter.com/validator to test in advance which photo Twitter will pick. Most plugins that control the og:image will usually default to your "featured photo" if one is set, otherwise they often default to a pre-settable photo if your post doesn't have one.

@billbennettnz Are you using Yoast, All In One SEO, or even Twitter plugin? Something similar to one of these is setting a meta property="og:image" with that photo as a value, and that's why Twitter is picking it up and displaying it.

@billbennettnz: @Chronotope had an interesting thread on this a while back:
https://twitter.com/Chronotope/status/830097158665801728?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw&ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmedium.com%2Fmedia%2Ffb8cfcbebb9d62968da518cc2f8fe49b%3FpostId%3Dcc404642a7ee

@jimmymansaray Your Twitter location lists you as in Pasadena! If you're free for coffee while you're here, I'm buying.

For the syndicated portfolio, you might want to take a peek at the PressForward plugin for WordPress [http://pressforward.org/]. While it is a stand-alone feed reader under the hood and could be used for creating an editorial flow, it will let you use a simple bookmarklet on your work published on another site to make a quick and complete copy of the post on your own site. Within the plugin settings you can set a "time to forward" (I use one second) such that people who visit that particular post will be automatically forwarded to the original (and canonical URL) on the commissioning outlet's site.

As an example, compare:
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/%F0%9F%94%96-feed-reader-revolution-its-time-to-embrace-open-disrupt-social-media/ (which is a bookmark with some commentary pointing to my post)
to
http://boffosocko.com/2017/06/09/how-feed-readers-can-grow-market-share-and-take-over-social-media/ (which is an exact copy of my post, which only I can see on my backend, that redirects the viewer to the original on AltPlatform).

This is beneficial as you can syndicate (POSSE) the post with your own URL to Facebook, Twitter, et al. and folks who click to read will be sent to your site for a moment before being forwarded on to the original. Thus you get a ping and the original outlet also gets a ping (as well as the advertising revenue for it.) And if, for any reason, the original outlet goes out of business, gets sold, or disappears, you've got a word-for-word copy of your original and can simply un-forward it so that it can appear on your site as it was originally published. Naturally if you prefer and the outlet doesn't stipulate otherwise, you could publish the original to your site and not forward it (or even forward it for an exclusivity window of time pre-agreed with the original publisher.)

Additionally, if you're using Brid.gy for backfeed, anyone who comments on your POSSE copies will have their commentary sent to your site. While others won't necessarily be able to see the commentary (if you're forwarding the URL to the publisher's original), at least you'll be aware of it and can reply to it and get your own replies in return. I suspect that in the future brid.gy may be able to scrape commentary based on the syndicated URL so that your personal version aggregates commentary from the publisher's original as well as mentions of it on Facebook, Twitter, et al.

There are still some missing pieces I'd like to see in such a workflow for journalists, but it's slowly and surely getting somewhere.

(I've written about other parts of PressForward before at http://boffosocko.com/2016/12/31/pressforward-as-an-indieweb-wordpress-based-rss-feed-reader-pocketinstapaper-replacement/ as I also have an off-label use-case to replace read it later apps like Pocket and InstaPaper.)

@djacobs noterlive.com is great for creating threads on Twitter. It gives you a full text for posting to your blog when done.

I'm curious if you've actually physically quit twitter? I much prefer reading your blog directly, but I'm always curious about people who've mentally/physically made the decision to leave.

@sikkdays What a great little post. It mirrors a lot of my own thoughts about social media. If you haven't seen it yet, one of my friends Tantek started a project called "100 Days of Positive Posts" that went pretty well. You might appreciate the idea: https://twitter.com/hashtag/100dopp?f=tweets&vertical=default&src=hash

Like you, he posts on his own site and syndicates to other social media services to reach his friends.