Matt Parkinson

MSci + ARCS + PhD + DIC

Analytical Scientist

NMR Spectroscopist

Doodle Creator

Maker

Matt Parkinson

MSci + ARCS + PhD + DIC

Analytical Scientist

NMR Spectroscopist

Doodle Creator

Maker

Project

Auto-updating CV via LinkedIn API

14 Mar 2011 IT

So I wanted to publish my CV on my home page but don’t want to have to update the original LaTeX document, my LinkedIn resume and my homepage. As I already have CV on my public linkedIn profile a solution was found through the wonders or WordPress plugins.

There are a few plugins to post your LinkedIn resume on your WordPress site:

  • LinkedIn Resume
  • LinkedIn hResume
  • LinkedIn SC
  • Both LinkedIn resume and LinkedIn hResume are very simple to setup by just adding the URL to your public LinkedIn profile. In contrast, LinkedIn SC is more complicated but allows access to individual items of your LinkedIn profile, this allows for a high degree of customisation and the application of your WordPress sites theme to your CV. LinkedIn SC also allows access to some restricted items through the use of the LinkedIn API.

    At present both LinkedIn Resume and LinkedIn hResume are broken, with LinkedIn Resume only returning a header. Due to this, and because I want to customise what is shown the LinkedIn SC plugin was used.

    Without any further action, at this point you can already access quite a bit of information from LinkedIn, however some specific information is restricted. To take full advantage of LinkedIn SC and have full access to the restricted items a unique user API key and secret are needed. To get these you need to register as a LinkedIn developer and setup an application. Once you have these you can access our information through the LinkedIn API with LinkedIn SC by setting your API key and secret.

    More information about setting up LinkedIn SC can be found here.

    If only life was that simple. One of the prerequisites of the LinkedAPI is SSL encryption and thus SSL needs to be enabled for the WordPress backend. This is quite easy to do by simply following the WordPress instructions and adding the following line to wp-config.php.
    define('FORCE_SSL_ADMIN', true);
    Now if your blog is hosted by a professional service then SSL and HTTPS access is probably already possible or at least someone will know how to help you.

    If you are hosting your own web server things are not so simple, for example in Mac OS X 10.6 SSL is not enabled by default. As certificates are involved enabling SSL and https is more than a simple modification of /etc/apache2/httpd.conf. See this post for further information.

    If using Mac OS X 10.7 the easiest way to setup up SSL is to use Mac OS X 10.7 server as this makes setting up a self-signed certificate very easy.