The Plurk development team is currently deploying several new features. Although this is merely a guess, it would appear that they are planning an update to the site search criteria and are modifying some of the Cascading Style Sheets. I happened across these while writing the latest tutorial for Plurk Skins. I was in the midst of styling the Plurk messages adding rounded corners, changing backgrounds, and basically messing around. Suddenly things started getting really weird. Weird in my world is a relative perspective. I am like a magnet for the weird so usually this sort of thing doesn't affect me. But when you are messing around with the presentation layer of a web page and suddenly content changes in strange and unusual ways you immediately begin questioning yourself. This is exactly what happened in my case. I modified the background on the response box of a Plurk message and the search box disappeared on the screen and was replaced with a new box pre-populated with "I love plurk". I ran back to my code to see exactly what I had done. Several panicked moments later I realized I was not responsible for that. While I remained confused I decided to continue. I again made what I thought were minor changes to the profile code and this time the font size of Plurk messages increased by 20 percent! Again my initial reaction was, "Now what did I do?" After several minutes of troubleshooting I again realized I didn't do it.
I am not exactly sure where this paranoia is coming from that I exhibited. I again started working on the tutorial. This time I was changing the background on the Plurk message box. Things looked ok but then the strange and unusual begin to occur. When I opened a message response box things worked fine but when I closed the response box the Plurk message background would revert to white. Once again I assumed that I was the one that caused this to happen. There were several minutes of troubleshooting only to find that the Plurk development team had hardcoded the background color on a message refresh using an element style; the mother of all styles. At about this time I decided maybe I needed to log out and back in.
When I did that I found a very active user community that were running around as if Godzilla were at the city limits and heading this way. To describe it as chaos would be an understatement. There were countless messages bouncing around as people were trying to figure out what was going on. There were votes being taken on whether people liked the larger font size or the original, there were blog entries being posted about the somewhat unfinished search functionality, there was even discussions on features that have not been around or active for over 2 months.
With things in such a state of chaos and incompleteness I've decided to table the tutorial for today until things calm down a little bit. Like everyone else I am curious what the development team have planned and how it may impact the profile work being done. I'm hoping that the developers are going to make more of the elements available to user CSS. I'd love to have control over the look and feel of the mouse over boxes for Karma, friends, search, mute, fans, external links, etc. Right now that doesn't seem to be available or at least I can't find it yet.
Just so this entry is not a complete waste, I'll leave you with a small tidbit that will allow you to change the default font size in a Plurk message.
.plurk_cnt {font-size: .98em;}
This CSS statement will set the font size to .98 em units which should be about what it was before the latest changes. You could set the font size to a pixel value if you want but from an accessibility perspective using EM as a size is preferred. This way it will scale when you increase the font size through your browser. The new value appears to be just over 1 EM so setting it to .98 will reduce it slightly while still making it legible. Much less than .95 EM and the responses get really tiny. This of course may need to be modified again once things settle down and all the changes the development team have done are propagated across all servers.
Hopefully things will calm down a little and I'll be able to finish the latest tutorial on making the Plurk message boxes and the qualifiers to have rounded corners. Best of luck during these changes. The best advice I can give you is to please remember the first rule of scuba diving, "1. Don't forget to breathe."
Leave a comment