Your Own Little Space on Glitch
Introducing user profiles
As Zac succinctly puts it, the Glitch community is all about people, making things and learning as you go. So the user profiles we’ve added on Glitch today are not only a place for you to share your projects, but they’re also a place for you to tell people a little bit about yourself, infusing your profile with your own personality.
Here’s a run down of the key parts of user profiles, along with some other important changes we’ve made to the community site.
Let’s start by taking a look at Jenn’s profile:
A bit about yourself
The first thing you see is a section about you. You can upload your own cover image (we recommend images 1200px wide, but we crop from the center of larger images) as well as set a bio, letting folks know what makes you tick. There’s markdown support, so it’s easy to link to your own blog, website or wherever else.
Thanking you
A prominent element of the user section is your thanks count. Praise is important in fostering a positive community and thanks are how you build reputation on Glitch.
You get thanks for helping people, either by directly responding to Glitch Help requests, or for creating interesting and reusable projects that people can learn from or make use of in their own projects.
Highlight projects
Beneath your user section is a list of all your own projects listed chronologically by last edit date, so the projects you’ve most recently made changes to are shown first.
However, you can highlight specific projects you’re proud of and want to feature by pinning them to the top of your profile.
Appear in search results
Any private projects you have are flagged up in yellow, but don’t worry — they aren’t listed on the public version of your profile page that’s shown to visitors. This is handy because users now appear in search results alongside projects. This makes it easier for you to find projects made by the coders and creators you already know.
Accessibility improvements
An often neglected aspect of many websites is accessibility, and to date, we’ve been guilty of that too. But no more! Accessibility is important to us as it’s a critical part in creating a truly inclusive community, which is exactly what we want. So worked into these updates, and across the Glitch community site, are some much-needed accessibility improvements. There’s still a lot of work to be done in the editor itself, but you should at least be able to navigate around the community site a lot easier than before.
And that’s it! Since we launched, user profiles are something many users have requested. Some industrious folks (like Stefan and David) have even taken it upon themselves to trawl through the devtools network tab, find the unpublished API calls we use, and make their own.
So we knew they were something we needed to add, but we’ve taken our time with them because we first wanted to see how the community would evolve, understand the types of profile pages people would want, and know the elements they’d value most. Let us know if we’ve delivered on that.
User Profiles are live now, so jump in and begin customizing your own.
