We had a blast visiting New York this week for the TechCrunch Disrupt conference. We announced the about.me API and SDK. Check out our developer documentation.
We also took background photos for attendees. The mix of creators, founders and startup enthusiasts was amazing. We’re still here for a couple more hours so stop by!
Thanks to everyone for stopping by the booth!
From teachers to poets, founders to students, Russians are in a word – creative! We discovered so many brilliant new pages perusing the related tags in this location.
We’ve shared more @aboutdotme over the past week and you can expect to see some of these folks in the Directory.
Be sure to click through so you can check out the details of these pages, yo-yo expert and security researcher included!
With a seemingly infinite number of colors to choose from, what’s the best way to pick the text on your about.me page? We have a couple tips!
On a grayscale or black and white background, you have complete freedom for which color to choose. We recommend just using one – it really pops against the background! Julia and Natalie provide great example pages for this technique.
Colorful backgrounds can present more of a challenge. Take this opportunity to enhance your bio with colors from your background image to create a cohesive look. Trako and Andrea show off this style.
There are tons of free tools available to help you view the value for a color to get a perfect match. On a Mac, the Digital Color Meter is the default app to grab a color value. For Windows, ColorMania and ColorPic are both recommended.
There are more great examples in the Directory. Let us know if you’ve added some color to your name or bio text!
As a member of the about.me team, I look at a lot of about.me pages. As a writer, I look at the bio as much as the background. Here are a couple tips to improve your bio’s impact.
Pick a text color that has a strong contrast from the background. If your background has a lot of colors, you can make the bio box opaque. (Click on Edit Your Page-> Colors -> Opacity.) The following pages are good examples of an easy-to-read bio box:
Although the bio is important, you still want to show off your background picture. Try dragging your bio box around so that you can see the best part of your picture. The following pages are good examples of bio box placement:
The width of your bio box is based on the width of your name or headline, whichever is widest. If your bio box is too wide, here are some things you can do:
If you’ve got a beautiful page, tell us about it!
We’re big fans of Pinterest here at about.me (some of us more than others). And we’re excited to announce that the Pin it button is now available on your about.me page.
With the addition of the Pin it button it’s easier than ever to quickly share your favorite about.me pages with the Pinterest community. In just one click, you can add it to any Board you have on Pinterest. And like the other one-click share buttons, you can enable or disable the Pin it button at the Settings tab of your Edit view.
At our own Pinterest account, we’re looking forward to creating some epic Boards based on the amazing about.me pages we see every day. As you can see from the photo above, we’re just getting started.
Have an idea for a board? Get one started or let us know!
It’s been a while since we’ve touched base with a location featuring about.me pages. To celebrate the launch of our page on Weibo, let’s check out China!
There are some beautiful vistas being used as background images for pages focused on China. Zhe Sun opens this post with Wei An following, above.
Beyond large-scale, there are some lovely, simple backgrounds as well.
Of course there are other styles of pages and backgrounds representing China, from the portrait like Andy Ann, to the designed like Bonnie Lo.
Have you found any others? Let us know!
Curious about our free iPhone app? Check out this video summary of what it does and how it looks. We’ve got Featured pages, Favorites, and Who’s Nearby all covered.
If you’re in a metropolitan area in the United States you may have seen this in a taxi already. Next time, take a pic and share it with us @aboutdotme or here in the comments!
Why should you use about.me? At about.me, we allow you to easily and quickly create a beautiful page that represents who you are online.
This video explains not only why you should create an about.me page, but also how. We cover writing a biography, choosing a background, adding services and getting visitors to your page. And we got a few friends to help. Take a look.
Thanks again to Dick Costolo, Lindsay Campbell, Jake Stride, Arianna Huffington, Om Malik, Nicole Lapin, Tom Conrad, Chris Sacca, Tony Conrad, Anna Maria, Robert Scoble, Lisa Foiles, and Kevin Rose for their fantastic pages we could use to show off these features.
So far this week, we’ve showed you how to choose a background image, tips on writing a bio and why to connect services to your page. You have a great looking page, so now what?
Today’s video features Kevin Rose explaining how to spread the word about your page, get more visitors and take it offline.
There are more ways to share your about.me page not mentioned here. We’ve seen people reference it in presentations online and off, create videos and share it on instagram, flickr and more.
What are some creative ways you’ve shared your page?
