Why:
My blog is performing well. I’ve optimised it, and I built it professionally. It’s responsive, clean under the bonnet, and it just works. However, I realised something along the way. Not every thought I want to share belongs in a full 500-to-1,000-word post. Most days, I only want to jot down a quick idea, perhaps throwing in a picture or a link, and then move on. The dilemma is that my current blog format doesn’t lend itself to those smaller, high-frequency posts.
So the idea hit me: I need to add the ability to post something really short, but it isn’t treated like a blog, so it doesn’t need to be posted like a blog!
“What would I name this new feature?” I thought of it. “Maybe name it after the sound of an animal.” I thought again, “… hey, birds do this really short Chirpy sound, so that’s it! I’ll call it a ‘chirp!’” I swear, I am so original, no one has ever come up with this.
Chirp!
The way I’ll describe a Chirp is, “A chirp is a short remark, as brief as its avian call or trill. Concise, intentional, and capped at 267 characters. It bears no relation to a certain ‘blue bird’.”
How it works
I made chirps appear along with regular articles in the blog home page so that the contents are unified. But on the side panel, you can see the list of the most recent blogs. Helpful if you only want to look through blogs, and at the bottom of the panel, there is an archive of all chirps for the full chirp experience.
With that said, I wanted to do “microblogs”, so I wanted my chirps capped at 267 characters. Definitely not a tweet thing.
And here’s a cool thing: the text size is variable depending on how much I type. The less I write, the larger the text; the more I write, the smaller it gets. At 267 characters max, the font is at a minimum of 16 points.
Feature: Attachments
It’s capable of including an image or a gallery of images, and can parse an embed like YouTube, Vimeo, and whatnot.
Galleries & Embeds
The gallery has dynamic sizing. It will produce a single column of images if you uploaded only one; it’s a 2-column gallery if there are two, and so on, up to 4 columns max.
The cooler thing that I did for the gallery, though, is that it can host an almost infinite number of images, but if there are more than 8 images, it will trim them, and you will see this “load more” button at the bottom of the gallery to see the next 8, and so on. Awesome.
The fonts are also variable when attachments are present.
“Open Graph”
Another “mildly-complicated-to-code” feature that I have in there is its ability to parse a URL from Chirp itself into a live link that shows an Open Graph snippet. This was not easy to do! I do understand that Twitter and Facebook already do this, but you know, it’s cool to be able to manually code it myself. The logic is especially significant because it has unique Performance and Caching features when retrieving Open Graph information.
“Hijacking” Twitter’s SEO
Well, the word hijacking is probably a stretch because I’m not really “hijacking”—as in taking control over Twitter. I say that because I don’t have a Twitter account (at least no one knows I own an account), but ALL MY CHIRPS WILL BE PULLED IN SEARCH ENGINES if someone searches for “Twitter” and “Vernard Mercader”. I think that’s pretty clever.
The way I did this is to incorporate basic and simple modern 2025 Search engine optimisation rules, coupled with Dynamic meta titling, meta descriptions, and JSON-LD structured data. Nothing out of the ordinary.
Easy adding, commenting, and editing
Since the Content management system is about as flexible as a dehydrated breadstick, I shoved a custom Chirp composer directly into the blog UI. Logged-in Editors and Admins get a nice big “Post a Chirp” box. Translation: I hacked my own shortcut because the CMS said “no” and I said “watch me.”
Honourable mentions
- It picks up nicely on search (if you don’t understand why this is significant: WP developers often have a hard time or forget entirely to include a new custom post type into the search query.)
- Commenting on a Chirp acts the same as the one in blogs; they’re nicely formatted and have threaded hierarchy.
- Chirps are well-designed to be distinguished from blogs on the blog home page.
- Well-designed for responsiveness. (If a “thing” isn’t designed with responsive design in mind from the get-go, those were never started with me. Never!)