Thursday, August 31, 2006

Make Yourself Known With A Bio

I just finished implementing another new feature -- bios.

Now when you look at your public page, in addition to your identities you will see a tabstrip above your identity list. Clicking on the Biography tab will take you to the newly created bio page.

What Can I Put In My Bio?
You can use this bio area to tell whatever you'd like about yourself. All I ask is that you keep it clean -- that is, please remember that this is a public page so don't get too raunchy and make me have to play policeman so that my site doesn't get shut down. Sorry that I had to say that, but it's better to be safe...

As for what you can technically do in this area, the answer is pretty much anything. You can type regular text (even UTF-8 unicode for our chinese members!), you can bold, underline, link to webpages, link to and display images...the HTML editor that I found and implemented is pretty robust. It does make use of Javascript, so trust me that life will be much easier if you have Javascript enabled for this page.

A Response To Requests
I fielded a few questions in the past about being able to have more than one website listed in your profile. If you look now, I've actually removed the "website" field (the profile page used to have name, location, website...) and I've moved that text into everyone's bio area as a starting point. Now that this bio text area is available, you can tell everyone about all the other websites that you own by putting that information in here.

How Do I Get Started?
In order to edit your bio, you have to be logged in. When you log in, you are still taken to your identity maintenance page, and you'll notice that I have changed things around a little bit again. Now in the right-hand sidebar you will see some links to take you to various pages. From here you can click on Profile and you'll be taken to a familiar looking profile page. It made logical sense to include the bio editing capability on this page, so that is exactly what I have done.

To edit your bio, just click inside the editor area and start typing.

Remember, your bio and all other profile information is completely optional! However, if you provide information there, it will be displayed. There is no "private" profile setting. So if you want to share this info with others, then go ahead and fill it out. But if you do not want to share any personal information or bio information, then just leave these areas blank.

Enjoy!

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