Personal Brand

Personal brand

I have been on LinkedIn for just over two years, but I only started posting actively in March 2024. In the eighteen months since then, I have produced a few masterpiece posts and several ongoing storylines.

Some of you may remember that LinkedIn locked me out at the beginning of the year. What frightened me most was the thought that I might lose access to my writing forever. Once the block was lifted, I began considering how I could download and preserve all that treasure.

But in what form? Put it all into a single Word document? Add page numbers, sections and a table of contents? Convert it to PDF? Even publish it as a book?

A month ago, I had a brilliant idea: create my own blog!

Well, I am a programmer, am I not? And now, a month later, I am ready to present my blog for your judgement. I will not write out the full address here because I do not want LinkedIn to limit the post’s reach, but it is simple enough: shorin dot me. As someone once wrote here, every mention of my surname helps build my personal brand. So it certainly cannot hurt.

The hardest part was prising all my posts from LinkedIn’s tenacious grip. LinkedIn insists that all the data is mine and even provides a tool for exporting it. Yet the export contains everything—my profile, likes, messages, job listings, CV, invitations sent and accepted—except the posts themselves.

In the end:

• I spent one week writing the blog’s code. I will cover the technical details in a separate post. It is all very cutting-edge—too good not to share.
• I spent two weeks copying posts and images, adding hashtags and linking the posts together.
• I spent another week on SEO: title, description, canonical, Open Graph, JSON-LD, favicon (I really ought to redraw it—but I am no designer), RSS and so on. If you are interested, I could write a post about that too.

I have no intention of stopping there. My next step is to launch a personal website where I will publish my project portfolio, CV, diplomas and certificates—in other words, something resembling LinkedIn’s Profile section. I will then weave all three resources—the portfolio, the blog and LinkedIn—into a single ecosystem.

Please pick my blog apart in the comments. I have stared at it for so long that I am blind to its flaws, and I am sure there are still plenty of mistakes.