Welcome to Plurk

We let it sink in a bit this time. The serendipity of hitting a friends’ profile and seeing something you wouldn’t quite expect has left a lot of people breathless and buzzing for the past couple of days. And we love that! We also got great early adopter feedback, fixed a few remaining bugs, and ensured we made this new feature super easy to use and share. So what are we talking about exactly? Well, if you haven’t heard it through the Plurkvine already, we’re happy to share with everyone the release of our new CSS profile customization styling feature!

Below is a quick Q & A on key points surrounding this new feature:

What does the custom CSS profile styling feature let me do?

To put it simply, this new styling option allows you to design and change the look and feel of ALL elements on your Plurk profile page; Colours can be changed, backgrounds can be altered and you can mix and match as much as you please.

How do I use it?

Click on ‘edit’ next to “My Profile”, select the “Customize Profile” tab and you’ll see the option to customize your profile even more with CSS. However, you will need a karma score of at least 25 to completely customize everything on your profile. If you need some help with styling your profile, check out our styling help page, or ask a friend for help.

OMG, why are you letting people go wild and create hideous looking pages?

Now hold on, don’t be so quick to judge! While we have a set of 12 standard background, timeline, and dashboard colour options available for everyone (depending on karma level), we found that a lot of you kept requesting that we allow you to style your profile pages to better reflect your own preferences/personality or showcase something that you were passionate about. This is exactly what we did! You see, unlike other social sites on the web where you are forced to spend the majority of your time browsing other users’ tacky or badly designed profile pages, the great thing about Plurk is that since you are mostly confined to spending your time viewing your own timeline page, you very rarely, if ever, are exposed to other users’ pages you can’t stand to look at because you think they are too ugly.

Can I see examples of some of the themes people have designed?

Here are a few that you can install by clicking on them:

Also, feel free to check out some of your friends’ profiles. Alternatively, there’s a great group created over on Flickr where users are showcasing some of their own themes.

How do I share my profile or use someone else’s profile I see and like?

Plurk is all about community, so we’ve made it easy for users to share their profile designs with their friends. Grab the share link off your ‘customize profile’ page and pass it along as you please. If you see a profile page you like, just ask nicely if the user is willing to share; remember though that some people may have spent hours or days on creating their designs so you are encouraged to respect their decision if they do say no.

Enjoy the feature folks, show-off your new themes and remember to plurk responsibly!

Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Sorry. Oh, did we mention, we’re sorry?

For those that missed it, our scheduled 1 hour maintenance window earlier this morning took quite a bit longer than we had anticipated. We admit, it was poor prognostication on our part. And that was bad. But in a way, it was also very good. Why? Plurk underwent a deep cleansing today, added some new features and is now speedier than ever. Here’s what the update means to you:

• The goal of this update was to prepare ourselves for rapid feature deployments without the need to take the site offline to complete them. Like us, we notice Plurkers are very passionate people, so we want to keep you as happy as possible. This update will hopefully allows us to make updates to the site on the fly without the requirement for periods of prolonged downtime.
• We introduced a new tabbed filtering view for the timeline which allows you to better filter out your plurks into: all plurks, just your plurks, and now, just private plurks. The introduction of viewing your ‘private plurks’ was a highly requested feature and now it’s easy to view those more critical plurks from cliques or other friends. (Think of it as an inbox for more intimate communication)
• The update allows us to slice and dice your timeline in more interesting ways and offer you additional filtering options down the road. (So, for example, you will be able to view just those plurks you’ve participated in, just those plurks sent to cliques or just those plurks you’ve favourited….all these features coming soon!)
• We purged a lot of the gunk in Plurk’s arteries and gave it some Aspirin and now it should be livelier and more responsive than ever. We have a few more changes coming by the end of next week that should improve responsiveness even further.

On the downside, we understand that a lot of people lost a lot of karma through no fault of their own due to our longer than projected downtime Plurk went on a bit of an extended holiday, but we know you were still knocking on our door to come visit. Therefore, we think it only fair that we compensate all Plurkers a few extra karma points for our mistakes. Have a look at your karma and you’ll notice we’ve raised it +1 point across the board!

Once again, sorry.

Mark it down on your calendar folks. Today, July 6th, 2008, is a special day in Plurkistan. Yes, today we bear witness to the first Plurker ever to reach the rarefied air that is Plurk Nirvana! Congratulations are in order for WendyKnits, who surpassed Karma of 81 and thus becomes the first member on Plurk to reach Nirvana. To paraphrase the humble words of Neil Armstrong, this is one small step for Plurk, one giant leap for Plurkkind! Congrats again, Wendy.

We have heard your complaints about our old widget (too fat, too orange, not plurktacular enough) and we have improved it vastly, hopefully to the point of plurfection. The new widget features include the following:

• You pick the colors that you like and that best match your website
• You decide the width and height of the widget
• Every user that signs up via your widget will increase your karma and become your fan on Plurk

The new widget can look like this, but it’s really up to you to decide how you want to spice it up:

Grab the widget from the Profile edit tab and start getting your blog readers on Plurk!

We have another widget right around the corner for all you Facebook, Myspace, Orkut, Bebo and other social networking junkies.