Google Code, User Search & Gravatar! NerdAbility Updates - September 2012

At NerdAbility HQ we have had a busy month, launching some cool new upgrades to your profile! This includes Google Code project integration, StackOverflow Flair and Gravatar profiles pictures! Additionally you can now search other users based on their username or skill, giving you the results along side the users NerdScore.

We have also added new privacy options to allow you to hide your page to the public while you are getting things ready. Oh, and if you don't want to be included in our user search feature, you can easily opt-out on the privacy settings page.

Other small changes include more ways to share your profile with enhanced social sharing buttons. This makes it easier to share your's or others profiles and show off!

We are going to keep pushing out more features, so keep an eye on your profile and the blog for the latest news. Now a quick guide to some of the new features.......

Setting Up a Gravatar Profile Photo - Stand out!

First of all login to your profile at http://nerdability.com - then once you are directed to your page look to the right hand side, if your picture, then hey, you already have a Gravatar! If you don't see a picture, or want to change it then you can follow the link underneath and go sign up (it's really quick and easy too).

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NerdAbility - Setting Up a Gravatar Profile Photo

Signup to Gravatar or Login

Adding Google Code Projects to your Profile - Show off!

If you have a Google Code profile you can now have your projects shown on your NerdAbility profile! It's just as easy as adding any other integration, simply login to your profile at http://nerdability.com and look at the right-hand side of your profile for 'Get Connected', then click the 'Connect Google Code' and enter your Google Code profile URL (something like http://code.google.com/u/....). 

NerdAbility - Connect Google Code

Searching & Searching - Find Other Awesome Techies!

You can now search our users to find who has certain skills, and then pick who you want to check out based on their NerdScore! This makes it easy to say find users with Java skills and then check out the person with the highest NerdScore! To access the search go to the Users page and get searching...

NerdAbility User Search

Changing Your Privacy Settings - It's Under Your Control!

We now offer privacy options for your profile, as we know you may not want your profile to be searchable or you may want to go into hiding for awhile. You can mange this quickly and easily from your profile page, simply login and click on your name in the top right of the page. Then click 'Privacy & Settings' from the drop down.

NerdAbility Privacy & Settings 

Next you can choose the privacy settings for your profile (and if you want to sign up to our site email updates). Hopefully it will look like this...

Privacy Privacy Privacy!

And that's all for this month! Make sure to spread the word and check us out on Twitter @Nerd_Ability

On Privacy

Online privacy is a serious thing. People take how much they reveal of themselves online very seriously, and quite rightly too.

Privacy is important to us at NerdAbility as well. From the start, we have been upfront with where we stand - your NerdAbility profile is a public profile to the world of just how awesome you are, its not somewhere where people will upload photos of compromising situations, or share trade secrets, its a place where people say, hey, I have my blog, and my StackOverflow profile, and my GitHub profile.. why can't i just bring them to one place, so rather than hoping a potential employer googles me, I can just say, check me out!

After all, NerdAbility doesn't expose anything that is already private on the web to anyone - it only shows already publicly accessible data (GitHub, StackOverflow, BitBucket, Blogs - all public data only).  When we recently rolled out the BitBucket integration, on first launch, we were alerted that private repositories were being displayed - this wasn't something we had done intentionally, it was actually because making anonymous, unauthenticated calls to the BB API returns private data too (we know, crazy right?) - but this is important to us, as well as to you guys, so as soon as we were alerted, we put in an emergency fix it and released within an hour.

So, why are we going on about all this stuff? The reason is, pretty soon we will be rolling out user search, making it much easier for people to discover just how awesome you are (searching by name or by skills) - so we just wanted to make sure we are all on the same page.

If you still have concerns, fear not, we know this is a hugely important and sensitive subject, so despite NerdAbility only showing publicly available data, we will also be adding a privacy option, allowing you to opt-out of the search results!