Recently Plurk made changes to their User Interface by enlarging several of the graphic elements within the dashboard area. This startled several members who immediately began looking for a way to resize the image to something slightly more manageable. During the incurring scramble to find a solution many users came up with creative ways of fixing the code. Thanks goes out to Plurk Layouts and Olivia Bell for first documenting the friends/fans elements so that a solution could be created. The first change was to the user's avatar image which increased in size by nearly 3 times. The second graphical change was in the Friends and Fans section. The user icons in those sections likewise received a size boost going from 25 pixels to 40 pixels. Users again were up in arms as the larger icons took up screen real estate. This tutorial has been written to provide you with the code necessary to change both of these image sizes as well as to center the icons within the Friends and Fans section.
Recently in New Features Category
Over the course of the last 24 hours the Plurk development team rolled out several new features to the Plurk community. Many of these were welcomed additions but a few of them had an undesirable impact. It was definitely one of those good news/bad news kind of things. The good news is that the features introduced are great additions to an already good product. The first new functionality was the inclusion of a "Block User" button to the user's profile. You now have the capability to block a user directly from their profile. This has been something that the user community has been asking about for quite some time so it's inclusion brought a lot of joy from the user base. The default graphic is a red square button so you can bet that I'll be covering how to theme that in an upcoming tutorial so it matches the style and color scheme of your profile page. The second new feature that was introduced was the ability to follow or friend someone directly from the friend/fan page. This again brings great strides in usability to the interface. Both of these show that the developers are definitely listening to the users which is one of the best reasons for using Plurk versus one of the other micro-blogging services.
Now for the bad news. I should probably preface this by saying this isn't necessarily bad news just that it had implications to a lot of users that were somewhat unexpected. In an effort to make Plurk faster and more scalable, the development team made several changes to the CSS files. These changes should make things run a little faster as the files have been optimized at least initially. As a result several areas may have broken if you have modified or customized your CSS profile.
From first glance it appears the changes have impacted the following:
- Modified the Karma arrow and added an element ID for it
- Added a SPAN and background image to the Find Twitter Friends box
- Added a SPAN and background image to the Embed Plurk Widget box
- Added a SPAN and background image to the Mobile Plurk link box
- Added a SPAN and background image to the Invite or Find Your Friends box
- Added an element for the Loading Image
- Added an element for the left browse arrow image
- Added an element for the right browse arrow image
- Added an element for the Back to Today image
- Added an element for the update box divider (# new plurks/# new responses)
Over the course of the next several days and weeks I'll continue to try and add new tutorials to the site. I'm also toying with the idea of releasing the themes that I am creating such as the Halloween theme you might have seen. I'm currently working on a Thanksgiving theme and I am in the initial planning stages to create a Christmas theme. I'll continue to use the motorcycle theme for continuity in the tutorials as well.
As always, if you have an idea for a tutorial or a theme please don't hesitate to ask and I will see what I can do to create something to meet your needs. As always I suggest following my Plurk account or check back often to stay abreast of anything new on the site.
Today Plurk introduced a new tab to cover the upcoming presidential elections in the United States. Along with it they also began a new contest including a mini-election where users are invited to vote for their favorite candidate. The tab appears below your timeline on the far right side of the screen. Hopefully the tab will be used by the Plurk community to search out
existing political discussions and concentrate the discussions there rather than creating new message streams.
There have been several people complaining that they don't wish to be involved in the political discussions and wish they didn't have to see them. While I can't solve the fact that political threads appear, I can provide you with a way of hiding the US Election 2008 tab. By adding the following code to your profile you will hide this tab:
#filter_tab .election {opacity:0;filter:alpha(opacity=0);zoom:1;}
This code will act upon the election tab and basically hide it from view so you won't have to look at it any longer. This line sets the opacity of the election tab to zero making it invisible. You can change the value from 0-100 to make it semi-transparent if you wish. It won't solve all your problems but it does allow you to make a statement that you don't want to be involved with the political views on social networking sites. Hopefully this will help some of you cope. Just breathe deeply and be comforted by the thoughts that the elections will be over in a month then hopefully things will calm down a little.
By now most everyone has probably found the new tab that has appeared below your timeline with the title of "Responded plurks" This tab followed the reintroduction of the "Private plurks" tab that reappeared last week. That now makes 4 tabs below your timeline that will allow you to filter the timeline display by "All plurks", "My plurks", Private plurks", and "Responded plurks". These are great features that are very useful to manage the various messages and discussions that you are involved with on Plurk. With the introduction of all of these tabs it is inevitable that we will want to modify their look and feel to match our profile theme. This tutorial will describe how to round the corners of the tabls to make them look like folder tabs rather than square boxes.
The Plurk development team is busy working on several new features and functions. They are also doing a little housecleaning and preparing the user database to become more useful. As such they needed to initiate an email validation routine for users. This will impact new users as they sign up but was rolled out to everyone in order to verify that the email message on record was correct and that users are receiving emails from Plurk. They therefore had the system request that each user validate their email address with the system. As you logged in you were notified with a bright reddish pink box in the title bar asking to validate your email. Well I couldn't just let that pass up since it clashed with the other messages on the system so I themed it. At first I thought why bother but then decided to do this in the off chance that Plurk will use the same CSS tag for other future messages then this will set them up to look more aesthetically pleasing and match the overall theme.
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.
This is a sure sign that you have completely lost your mind when it comes to modifying your profile. The Plurk development team introduced a new color scheme for the drop down menu next to the Plurk Message Author's name. Rather than being appreciative of their hard work and admiring the job they did; I immediately began scouring the CSS to identify what tags they were using so that I could modify it. I wonder if there are psychologists that now specialize in helping people with obsessive CSS disorders? While I contemplate whether CSS obsession is covered under my medical insurance, let's see if we can modify this new section to fit aesthetically with the theme we are building for our profile.
