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.

Let's now continue to add some more stuff into our profile, with 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.