Time for action—editing your profile
- Click the Profile button on the main menu.
- You will notice that Mahara has opened the Profile submenu. The Edit Profile tab is selected when you first enter your profile space. Let's take a quick look at Janet's profile. You will notice that the About Me tab is selected. Janet has already entered her name.
- Say something about yourself! Scroll down to the Introduction section of the About Me page and enter some text. Here is what Janet Norman typed in:
- Whenever you make any changes, click the Save Profile button at the bottom of the page.
- Next, click the Contact Information to the right of the About me tab.
- You will see that you are expected to fill out some telephone numbers and addresses. The first thing you should notice is that you can have more than one e-mail address in a Mahara site. To add another e-mail address, click the link to Add email address. The e-mail address will receive a confirmation e-mail from the Mahara site and you will have to go to your e-mail account and follow the link to confirm it is genuine.
- You can now use radio buttons to toggle which e-mail address you would like to use as default for your account. This selection is important because it is at this address that you will receive system messages. You will also notice that you can delete an e-mail address by clicking the small, red-colored cross to the right of the e-mail address.
- Fill in your contact information on this page. Remember, you don't have to complete all the fields if you don't want to.
- Click the tab called Messaging. Mahara will bring together the types of people you are likely to engage with in live text, audio, and video conferences. People can display these contact details to each other in their profile page and other web pages. Enter your contact details for the facilities you use on this page. If you are still not using live conferencing tools, perhaps now is the time to start thinking about it.
- Finally, click the tab called General. On this page enter your Occupation and Industry (remember to click the Save Profile button when you have finished). Janet Norman typed this:
What just happened?
You have just completed your profile by entering some information about yourself, including your personal information, what messaging/conference tools you use, and your Industry background.
Both the Contact Information and Messaging information are private and will only be seen if you add them to a web page. This is because you don't necessarily want anybody in the Mahara site to be able to see your telephone number and address for security reasons.
Tip
Help!
If you have found so far that you wish you had a bit more information about what certain options do, then don't worry! Mahara is very well documented soft ware. On most pages, you will see little question mark icons, that look something like this: 
If ever in doubt, click on these and you will be given very useful and specific help relati ng to your area of doubt.
Let's now continue to add some more stuff into our profile, with profile icons.
Profile icons
Profile icons bring your profile to life! They are the first thing that people see about you when they are interacting with you in different areas of the site.
Mahara allows you to upload up to five different profile icons. This becomes very useful (as we will see in Chapter 4) when you are making web pages out of your stuff. You can present yourself to different audiences in different ways, simply by altering your profile icon. For example, you can display a serious passport photo to your professional work colleagues, a more informal photo to your closest work colleagues, perhaps an avatar for public groups where you would like to be a bit more anonymous, and a picture of you having fun at a party for some of your more social interactions.