I heard or read someone, recently, saying that LinkedIn was nothing more than a glorified resume. Well, 10 years ago this was certainly true and I was not looking for anything more. I had ditched the Word documents since a long time and was distributing my résumé in PDF format, despite some recruiters stubbornly asking me Word documents.

Actually, if I had found a way to distribute it as an XML document I would have done it.

When LinkedIn came over I saw it as the simplest way to distribute my résumé, just give the damn recruiters a link and let them forward it as is, download a PDF or whatever (some are still stupidly asking for Word documents, mind you).

Nowadays, beside being a glorified resume, LinkedIn is also a community (or communities) that some are smart enough to leverage and make a lot of business with (not me). Anyway, this post is not really about that…

At the early beginning of this website, this website itself was my résumé (here’s a link to an early version on the Wayback Machine) and there was also a PDF version to download. Then it turned into a blog, but the HTML résumé and the PDF remained. When I switched to LinkedIn, I removed the HTML and PDF versions of my résumé and replaced them with a link to my LinkedIn profile.

Recently I wanted to add back my résumé in HTML format and especially my recommendations here on vedovini.net. Since I am running WordPress, I first looked for a plugin that would enable me to fetch my profile and put it on a page. I found a few that would do that, but I was not really happy with any of them, and none of them had the ability to fetch my recommendations and put them in a slider. So being the developer that I am I just did one.

It’s called WP LinkedIn (very original as usual) and it’s here, in the WordPress plugin repository. It provides you with shortcodes to insert your résumé or a rotating scroller of your recommendations in any WordPress page or post. There’s also a widget if you want to put the scroller in a sidebar. There are some options to decide what to display exactly from your profile and you can also code your own templates, in your theme, if you need to add sections beside the provided defaults or have a design makeover.

You can see the plugin in action on this blog, either on the Home page where the recommendation scroller is (I put it at the end of this post too) or on the About page which features my LinkedIn profile.

This post is part of the second “Back to Blogging” challenge initiated by Stephanie Booth.

Image Credits: Jerry Luk