No thumbnail

A page shows a video hosted on YouTube or Vimeo, and uses the video’s thumbnail: the image shown in place of the video until a reader presses play. The site’s fetched/stills/ folder has no thumbnail for this video, so thumbnail is empty.

What you’ll see

warning  No thumbnail: `statac refresh` hasn't fetched an image for this video yet
  Run `statac refresh` to fetch one.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/no-thumbnail/

In the terminal, the message also shows the file and line, if there is one, and marks the exact text.

Why Statac warns

If a page loads a video site’s player as soon as it opens, the video site learns about every reader who visits, whether or not they watch. If the page shows a thumbnail instead, and loads the player only when the reader presses play, the video site learns about no one until then. statac refresh fetches the thumbnail from the video site once, and the site keeps it, because statac build never uses the network. That way, building the same files gives the same result every time, and works with no connection at all.

Statac warns once for each video, however many pages show it. If a page’s content shows the video, the warning points at the call in the Markdown. Otherwise it points at the template. If the video site replied that it has no image for the video, statac refresh marks the video absent in fetched/record. It then doesn’t ask again, and the warning says so.

How to fix it

Run statac refresh in the site’s folder. It fetches a thumbnail into fetched/stills/ for every video whose thumbnail a page uses, and lists what it fetched. Commit fetched/ with the rest of the site.

If the video site has no image, show one of your own. A snippet can take your image as an argument you define, such as poster, and show it with page.image instead of the thumbnail.

Once you have understood the warning, you can quieten it by name.

Example

In content/post-1.md:

@youtube("https://youtu.be/abcdefghijk")

After statac refresh:

Fetched `fetched/stills/youtube-abcdefghijk.jpg`.
Fetched 1 thumbnail.

To stop Statac showing the warning, add this to statac.yaml:

quiet: [no-thumbnail]

Its name

Name	no-thumbnail
In the terminal	statac explain no-thumbnail
To stop showing it	quiet: [no-thumbnail] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.