New Features: August 2008 Archives

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.

Welcome to Plurk Skins where I'll attempt to teach your Plurk Creature new tricks.  I've set up this site to begin documenting the various aspects of the "Insanely Great" social media service Plurk.  For those of you unaware of this incredible site; it is a micro-blogging service that provides conversational threads for communicating with your friends.  I happened across this site in June and immediately became hooked.  I've met some incredible people and learned a tremendous amount.  The service is available world-wide and gives you an opportunity to meet people with similar interests as yours.  I've become great friends with people from Austria. Australia, Great Britain, Canada, and many other areas of the world.  The system is run by a great set of developers who are meaningfully connected to the community.  As such they are constantly coming out with new features to make the user experience even better.