Social Networking on Elgg Platform

Steps

Each tab has a Save your profile button at the end. When you press this button, Elgg updates your profile instantaneously. You can fill in as much detail as you want, and keep coming back to edit your profile and append new information. Let's look at the various tabs: Basic details: Although filling information in any tab is optional, I'd advise you to fill in all details in this tab. This will make it easy, for you to find others, and for others to find you. The tab basically asks you to introduce yourself, list your interests, your likes, your dislikes, your goals in life, and your main skills. Location: This tab requests information that'll help members reach you physically. Fill in your street address, town, state, postal code, and country. Contact: Do you want members to contact you outside your Elgg network? This tab requests both physical as well as electronic means which members can use to get in touch with you. Physical details include your work, home, and mobile telephone number. Electronic details include your email address, your personal and official websites. Elgg can also list information to help users connect to you on instant messenger. It supports ICQ, MSN, AIM, Skype, and Jabber.

Employment: List your occupation, the industry and company you work in, your job title and description. Elgg also lets you list your career goals and suggests you do so to "let colleagues and potential employers know what you'd like to get out of your career.". Education: Here you can specify your level of education, and which high school, university or college you attended, and the degree you hold. A s you can clearly see, Elgg's profiling options are very diverse and detailed. Rather than serve the sole purpose of describing you to the visitors, the profile also helps you find new friends as well, as we'll see later in this chapter.

Alternate methods

No Alternate methods Yet... What is FOAF? While filling the profile, you must have noticed an Upload a FOAF file area down at the bottom of all tabs. FOAF or Friend of a Friend is a project (http://www.foaf-project.org/) to help create "machine-readable pages that describe people, the links between them and the things they create and do". The FOAF file includes lots of details about you, and if you have already created a FOAF profile, Elgg can use that to pick out information describing you from in there. You can modify the information once it's imported into Elgg, if you feel the need to do so. The FOAF-a-Matic tool (http://www.ldodds.com/foaf/foaf-a-matic.en.html) is a simple Web-based program you can use to create a FOAF profile.

Suggested readings

As the profi le lists several vital and sensitive pieces of information, privacy concerns have been addressed in this chapter. We've seen the various built-in options that Elgg provides, as well as the mechanism to create our own custom groups. Then, we've covered how one can connect with other users on the network. Again, privacy concerns have been addressed, followed by a discussion about moderating friendship requests. We also ran through Elgg's built-in mechanisms for attracting visitors to join the network, and various account settings that a user can alter. After reading this chapter, you should have no trouble adding, managing or connecting to members in your Elgg network.Where to buy this book You can buy Elgg Social Networking from the Packt Publishing website: http://www.packtpub.com/elgg-social-networking/book. you could download the full chapter here: http://www.packtpub.com/files/Elgg-Social-Networking-Sample-Chapter-Chapter-3-Users-Profiles-and-Connections.pdf Free shipping to the US, UK, Europe and selected Asian countries. For more information, please