Well being as there is no support for twitter cards short of public support, and its very clear twitter cards are broken, I figure I will just keep updating this ticket with what I am learning in case it helps other users.
My problem seems to specifically relate to an issue between my site, bitly, and twitter.
When I validate a card it works perfectly. When I post, I use bit.ly for tracking reasons. So on the posts that won’t display, I grab the twitter redirect url after I have tweeted and try to validate that.
It finds the meta tags, shows the url forwarding to my site, and then shows “Can’t render card”. I copy the url its trying to forward to and verify that, and it verify’s and renders perfectly… I try the twitter url again - and again it can’t render.
So I go back to the tweet in question and copy the bitly link. I toss that into the validator and it redenders perfectly, then I retry the twitter url and… it starts working.
So for clarity - these are the steps I have to perform to get twitter cards to display.
First - make my tweet.
Second - Copy the bitly link that redirects to my site.
Third - Copy the twitter link that redirects to my site.
Fourth - Get the actual url to my site.
Fifth - Validate my actual url in validator.
Validate the bitly link in the validator
Validate the twitter link in the validator.
And then that specific card will appear.
I have to do this to make about 40% of my twitter cards appear - the other 60% work perfectly.
First I test twiter url:
Then I validate actual url:
Then I validate bitly url:
Then twitter cards work:
