I described the process of laying out your view in my previous post. This, though is where it gets interesting. Portfolios.lincoln uses what are known as “blocks” to populate your views. Each block represents one or more artefacts in your portfolio and shows that artefact in the view. In this post, I’m going to look at the blocks you need to set up a simple CV.

Assuming you’re logged in, click “My Portfolio” and then “My views”. Then click the “Create view” button.

You’ll see the tabbed “blocks” menu across the top of the screen

You decide what you want to appear in this view of your portfolio by dragging the relevant block to the appropriate position in your layout.

In most views, you’ll want to include some information about yourself, so start by clicking the “profile” tab. This has five blocks, and we’ll look at them one by one.

Contact information

When you drag this to the layout area, you will be given a range of actions, asking you which bits of your contact information you wish to share. Simply tick the boxes that you want to include.

Profile information

When you drag this block into your layout area you’ll be asked which bits of your profile you want to show, which, if any of your profile pictures you want to show, and given the opportunity to write a short introduction about yourself.

Friends, Groups and Views.

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These three icons all work in exactly the same way. If you have added any friends, joined any groups, or created multiple views you can drag the relevant icon to your chosen layout column, and they will display a gallery of your friends, or a list of your groups and views.

Resume

You can either include your entire CV in a single block or you can control how it is displayed by a view by selecting which fields you want to display, and in which order.

If you simply want to create a view that shows your CV (or resumé) and nothing else, then you might consider creating a view with one column, and just dragging this block into it. You can choose what title you give it, but otherwise there is no control over how your resume is displayed. (You can of course add other columns and blocks.)

If you want a slightly more sophisticated view, you can add single fields from your CV (e.g. Contact or Personal Information, employment history, education history, books and publications, personal academic or work skills) by dragging the

single field block into the view. You can do this as many times as you like for each of your resumé fields. Once you’ve added it to the view, you can change the name of each field. For example, you could change “Education History” to “Qualifications” if you felt it was more relevant. The advantage is that you can control exactly how readers see your CV, and allows you to combine different parts of your CV with evidence of the claims that you are making. Unlike a traditional CV, Portfolios.lincoln allows you to show off examples of the work you have done. The next post will look at how to integrate files, blogs, and multimedia into your view.