When you go to a profile page on DEV, mine for example, there are a lot of things on there: your featured GitHub repositories, social links, your posts, and your recent comments.
There are two sides to the profile: what you would like to feature on your own profile, and what you would like to see on someone else's.
For your profile: what would you ideally use it for? Would you like to send it to prospective employers? Use it as a portfolio of your blog posts? Or, as a landing page for yourself on the internet?
For someone else's profile: what would you be visiting their profile for? Are you an employer? Or, interested to learn more about an author?
In each scenario, what information would be helpful to have on that profile? Of those things, which are the most important to you?
Feel free to think big and be creative! Thanks in advance for your feedback and ideas! 😊
Latest comments (56)
One nice to have thing on profile is # of followers. Not only do people like to brag about their achievements, but your follower count acts as a reputation token on the interwebs.
Its one of the determinants for the level of trust you may want to put on an author. Like in the 18th century (when there was no internet), how do you think people came to the conclusion that some authors like Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Milton, etc. were better than the rest? That's where reputation points come into picture, those authors who were referred to by other authors who's books they used to read were treated with more respect in comparison to those who weren't.
I won't trust any random dude on the interwebs unless a hundred other people trust him/her. If that number went to a thousand, its even better, a million will convey even more trust, etc.
I'd really like to be able to link two sites since I have one for Elixir and another for front-end.
Another thing is YouTube. I don't really use a lot of the other networks like LinkedIn or Facebook, but I most of the tech related content I make is for YouTube.
Language Badges! <3
Well I was going to come here to say we could do with a Mastodon link, but it turns out that's been added since the last time I looked, so yay for that.
I'll poke the bear and say it's got a bug - it's the only icon to have a title tag, which just reads "mastodon icon" so I suspect that's an oversight?
I don't use my profile for anything. I wouldn't share it with anyone except on a reciprocal site (so for how we have links to twitter, I might put a link to my dev.to profile on twitter), but it's not something I'd go out of my way to show people. If I was introducing someone to the site, I'd point them to an article I liked or the main page.
Something that might be fun could be a drawing. You know the thing on the network error page where you can doodle away? Maybe you could have a spot for doing that when you're bored and the latest one appears as a sort of status.
I think we can't talk about the profile page without bringing in the profile panel that accompanies posts.
You know how it's almost (but not quite) the same? Both have "work", "location", "education" and "joined", but the profile page has "email" and the info panel here has "+follow". I'd like to see them both have the same information. I'd also make things linkable, or taggable, so that "Washington, DC" links to a feed of posts from other people who have that as a location, or links to posts tagged with it. That would be great for arranging meetups and conferences and so on, without particularly inviting people to become stalkers.
I'd change the "joined" date, because it's the least useful piece of information. Sure it's interesting to see someone's been on the site for a while, but we have badges for that already, and nobody cares if you joined on Oct 25 or Oct 24. The specificity is really odd. When you made that post about people's CVs it's a point I kept bringing up - people don't need to be specific. It might be friendlier to say "joined: last summer" or something fuzzier, or just to skip it at all. It feels a bit like the info panel needed to look busier and so someone picked the only other bit of public-safe data they could.
How about something about other things you like? In the same vein as liking posts or pinning your own to your profile (as others have said) it'd be cool to be able to promote other people's posts in a little side-panel. Maybe using the unicorn or something - so people seeing your profile could see the last few posts other people made that you thought were coolest.
Sorry this is a bit rambling, I'm insert excuse right now.
I'm going to be super controversial...
I just like it very simple. Give me a brief flavour of who you are, and how to get in touch (social).
For all else, I just want to read it in your posts!
I like a lot of the other ideas listed here. I think many could stand on their own as features instead of overloading profile.
I don't know if this has been said before, but...
It'd be super awesome to be able to add more custom CSS to our own Dev.To profiles.
Like, Myspace or Neopets.
This may actually be a terrible idea but I feel the same fun expressiveness here that I did on Myspace/Neopets!
Please don't add more statistics - like followers and total likes. I think keeping these hidden is part of the reason why the community is so nice here.
Pinned posts (and comments) would be nice.
I second all 3 of these. 👌
I read all of the ideas from the above comments. I would love to see top articles, reading list of the particular user.
But, how about a birthdate? (Just thinking out loud and may sound completely irrelevant).
Let's say it's my birthday today. Then my profile will have a special emoji around my birthdate. This can be right below the date joined.
I don't have specific features, just usage considerations.
I wouldn't use my profile to send to (potential) employees/clients. I'd prefer that to be my own website, my own place on the web. I want my DEV.to profile to represent my identity within this community, although I have nothing against showing off things from other places around the web like GitHub repos, portfolio items, StackOverflow rep/top tags/...
That's an awesome insight!
Ability to follow people back from your followers list.
I'd like to see "this person follows you" if the person follows me.
This is so helpful Ryan, thanks for taking the time to share it! I will definitely check this out!
I would love to see the PWA of dev.to to go for a Dark Theme 😍
i would like to see shared post that i can comment out that my friend can see, simple portfolio is very good, who knows in the future there will be dev.to/job section?