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LinkedIn, the largest online network for professionals, recently announced that a series of new applications would be available to customize profiles and resumes: among these, the new WordPress LinkedIn application lets you add a module with your latest blog posts to your linkedIn public profile.

Modules in LinkedIn profiles have existed for quite a long time now to allow users to easily find jobs, discussions and potential connections, but until just a few days ago they could only be seen privately: now, the eBay-owned company decided to make quite a radical move and allow for greater personalization of public profiles to be shown to the public.

The ten new applications that were launched just recently can be found here and range from “Company Buzz”, an applet to display recent Twitter posts featuring the names of the companies you work at, to “Google Presentation” and “Slideshare presentation”, two applications to make your resume go multimedia thanks to PowerPoint presentations.

As for the new WordPress module, it simply allows you to display links to your latest blog posts from your LinkedIn profile. You can filter the post by tag, or simply choose to have all of them featured on your resume, towards the bottom of the screen: if you choose to filter the blog content by tag, you’ll need the tag name to be “LinkedIn”, which means you’ll have to spend a little while editing any previous post on your blog that you want to appear on your online resume.

Once the setup process is completed, network updates will notify your connections every time a new post is added on your profile: from there, your friends and colleagues can look at a short preview of the post and, if they wish, read the entire post as well as navigate your blog.

GD LinkedIn Badge widget screenshot

WordPress users seem to have appreciated this new feature, to the point that a blog post on WordPress.com reports the traffic overflow initially caused problems for the LinkedIn servers, although the initial problems now seem to have been resolved and the feature is working correctly at the time of writing.

Interestingly, there are also ways to display or feature your LinkedIn resume directly from your WordPress blog: for those who want to increase traffic to both sides, this seems like a good option. Searching the plugin section of WordPress.com, two modules seem to be apt to do the job.

The first, hResume, has unfortunately been discontinued in 2007 and is only compatible with WordPress versions up to 2.1: according to the description, it allowed webmasters to “grab the hResume microformat block from your LinkedIn public profile page allowing you to add it to any Wordpress page and apply your own styles to it.”

GD LinkedIn Badge, instead, makes it easier for webmasters to display a LinkedIn badge with a description to a LinkedIn public profile page, allowing you to easily customize both the description text and the size and style of the badge to be displayed, taking the code directly from the LinkedIn website: all the settings can be managed directly from the Widgets interface, a subsection of the “Themes” page in your admin interface.

Tags: LinkedIn, WordPress LinkedIn application, WordPress module

Dario Borghino
Dario Borghino is a computer engineering student at Turin's Polytechnic, Italy. He started writing science and technology related articles in February 2008 and his articles have appeared on sites such as ISEdb.COM, eHow and Suite101.com. You can visit his personal Web site here.
More posts by Dario Borghino

This entry was posted on Friday, November 7th, 2008 at 11:27 am and is filed under CMS News. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.