I’ve recently been playing around quite a bit with a new professional network known as Polywork and I must say that I have been thoroughly impressed by the genuine feel of the platform as compared to other popular networks. If you aren’t aware yet, Polywork is a professional social network that allows users to establish an “activity portfolio” of their professional life, as coined by Matty Stratton.

A platform as different as the people who populate it

One of my biggest gripes with platforms like LinkedIn is that it sets a tone that treats people like their professions are the whole of their identity, which in turn creates an atmosphere rife with elitism. Polywork sets itself apart in this regard by creating a platform for multi-faceted individuals that take pride in their activities outside the office just as much as those that take place inside.

The platform looks beyond the idea of a job title and takes a deeper look at what drives each individual user both inside and outside of work while allowing them to create a chronological record of the professional and personal works they are most proud of.

Content curation based on relevant “badges”

This work is then sorted into categories that are called “badges” which allow your to organize your portfolio to be shared with the overall “Universe”. Here your can brows other user’s profiles based on their badges and the content they have posted to their page. Other users can also find your public Polywork page based on your provided badges and content.

Making your profile more visible with a custom domain

A custom domain is a website address that you can purchase from a domain registrar (such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, Google Domains, and many others) and then connect to your Polywork space. This allows your profile to be more easily locatable in the “Universe” as well as gives your profile a custom feel. Once you connect your custom domain, the domain will replace the Polywork URL of your space with your own domain URL.

In this guide, I am going to take a bit of a different approach from the original Polywork documentation and show you how you can set up custom domain profiles for users within an organization or agency.

Setting up Google Domains DNS

So as you can see below, I bought a domain a while back that I use for my Cloudspeakers homepage. While this domain leverages Google Domains for DNS, Polywork supports a range of other DNS providers such as GoDaddy, Namecheap, and Hover.

Step 1: Set up the domain

Once you’ve created/purchased a domain, you’ll want to check that Google Domains has verified your domain. The next part is where we are going to diverge from the Polywork documentation and instead, we will provide our custom profile domain as a subdomain of Cloudspeakers.

Step 2: Specify a custom subdomain in Polywork

Head into settings on your Polywork profile page and specify what you want the custom domain of your Polywork profile to be.

Step 3: Generate a custom DNS target

The next step is to generate a custom DNS target that you will input into the DNS management console.

Step 4: Configure DNS

Sign in to Google Domains and head over to the DNS management area where we are going to configure the CNAME records for your Polywork profile. Navigate to the custom and select CNAME from the drop-down menu for Type.

For Name, you’re going to want to figure out what you want your profile subdomain to be. I find it good practice to make it a first name. Next, input 1M as the TTL, followed by inputting your Custom DNS target (e.g. powerful-plain-yns1ix6cq9yekyp.herokudns.com) into the Value line.

If all goes well, it should come out looking like this when you type your subdomain and domain in the browser bar:

And that’s it! Next, I’m going to talk a little bit about the motivation behind why I did this as opposed to just a traditional wwwsubdomain.

My motivation for doing this

For context. I run a niche cloud-native content agency known as Cloudspeakers that provides Developer Relations and content writing services to technology companies.As an agency, I wanted a way that I could set up Polywork profiles for my individual contractors the would act as a subdomain of my root domain. So for my personal profile, it would look like this:

https://james.cloudspeakers.dev

And if I was setting up another person named say Tim Apple, it would look like this:

https://tim.cloudspeakers.dev

This type of methodology would allow my staff to all share a root domain while having easily accessible profiles based on their first names. Pretty nifty right? Let me know what you think about this approach and I’d love to hear about how you would leverage this.

Find me on Polywork!!!

Originally published at Cloudspeakers on April 30, 2021.