How to publish your digital business card on Bio Link

Bio Link is a service that allows you to make business card-like webpage in the form of a list of links. For example, you may list your LinkedIn and GitHub links along with your personal website. However, what if you want to share your actual digital contact card? Apple uses vCard files for their iPhones, which may appear with the ".vcf" file extension. I don't have personal experience with what Android uses, but Google search results indicate they also use this convention.

To share your digital contact card with Bio Link follow these easy instructions.

(1) First, you will need to upload your vCard file somewhere so it can be downloaded by other users online. For example, you can upload it to Google Drive, OneDrive, iCloud, or, as in my case, host it on your personal Wix website.

(2) Copy the link to your uploaded vCard file.

(3) On Bio Link, create a new link.

(4) Add a name and icon to your new link, and then paste the upoaded vCard file URL.

(5) That's it!

(6, optional) For an improved user experience you can designate a custom name that should be given to the file when downloaded. This is useful if the hosting platform changes the name of the uploaded file. You can do this by appending "?dn=MY-ENCODED-CUSTOM-NAME.vcf", where "MY-ENCODED-CUSTOM-NAME" is the URL-encoded custom name of your file. For example, if you want the custom file name to be "John Doe.vcf", you would use "John%20Doe.vcf" and the URL suffix would be

?dn=John%20Doe.vcf

So, if your original URL is

https://www.somehost.com/my-very-long-and-ugly-file-name.vcf

Then the result would be

https://www.somehost.com/my-very-long-and-ugly-file-name.vcf?dn=John%20Doe.vcf

You can use any of the many free services available online to URL-encode your text, like this one from W3 Schools.