Twitter Card Validation - Non-public facing website

lowlus · 2013-09-10T23:04:32.000Z

Hello,

I am working to implement Twitter Card functionality for a very large e-commerce website. I work with a large team of developers with a shared code-base with very heavy controls surrounding changes and numerous phases of QA. We do have several staging environments that ARE public facing, however, they require a username/password to authenticate.

My question is: How do I validate and get approval to implement Twitter Cards if I am (currently) not working on a publicly facing website? How do I test my implementation locally if you require a public-facing website for validation. Is there another process I can go through to get approval?

Thanks!

heiseonline · 2013-09-11T11:42:52.000Z

Short answer: make your changes only visible to TwitterBot’s IP range.

Long answer: Make your changes incrementally. First, enable the twitter meta tags. They won’t change the user experience. Then validate them and finally, get approved by Twitter. [I do realize that this may not be possible in your organization.]

lowlus · 2013-09-11T17:10:41.000Z

Unfortunately, our next production release is not until January 2014. Our goal is to have this feature implemented before January so that we can undergo UAT – we don’t want to have to wait until January just to deploy some meta tags to wait longer to get approval.

Is there an alternative method to getting approval?

lowlus · 2013-09-17T16:38:24.000Z

@heiseonline - What would be the best way to allow access to TwitterBot? Is there a known range of IP addresses? Should we do a check for the user-agent? Appreciate the help

froginthevalley · 2013-09-17T17:26:16.000Z

Yes, check for user-agent “Twitterbot” this is the best way to do it.