When I first heard about Amix’s announcement that Plurk was allowing custom CSS on Plurk profiles, I was excited immediately. This means I can create graphics and build custom color schemes to display my profile how I want (something the Twitter folk have been experimenting with a lot lately).
As the thought started to sink in, however, I started to worry a bit. Amix’s profile looks nice, as do several others, but when users like Will_00 post tiled graphic backgrounds, things start to get questionable. MySpace anyone?
Plurk does a good job trying to help those who are unfamiliar with CSS, but you can really only go so far. The code can be taught, but style and design is something you’ve just got to have an eye for.
Because I like this latest update to Plurk and think it will make a lot of people happy, I hope that the users don’t abuse it and turn it into something to be scared.
However, lucky for Plurk users, you don’t actually have to visit anyone’s profile pages to see what they are saying or doing. Just visit the page one time, long enough to see the ‘Add as Friend’ or ‘Add as Fan’ buttons, and you’re done. That’s an advantage Plurk has over a place like MySpace, which requires you to endure those awful animations and glitzy profiles just to figure out what your friends have been up to.
Share Your Profile
Also, it appears mahadewa has started a group on Flickr for users to post and share their Plurk profile themes. No one has uploaded anything yet. Several profile screenshots have now been uploaded.
More Resources for Styling Your Profile
- notmuchmore has put together an excellent post with a few more details and step-by-step instructions on how to customize the CSS for your profile. (Added 07/22/08)
- ZenElements, has also written a great guide for modifying your Plurk CSS. (Added 07/23/08)
Please visit each of these resources and let us know how what you think of them.
July 22, 2008 at 9:23 pm
Nice job! I’m taking votes on which one I should stick with…
http://www.plurkaholics.com/we-haz-custom-css/
Plurk on!
Jane
July 22, 2008 at 10:07 pm
[...] See the rest here: Plurk Allows Custom CSS For Profiles [...]
July 23, 2008 at 5:02 pm
Sex, sausages, and music (especially drumming). Each of these are things many people love. Each of them is ugly in the early stages, as people learn how to make them properly, through huge amounts of trial, error, practice and ruptured intestines.
Art, design and CSS are similar, and I personally like that people can learn them in places like this and myspace, and get all the fugly out of their system before they hit the real world.
Not that it helped me any…
August 16, 2008 at 7:55 am
Hi, for about a month, I’ve created plurktemplates.com where users can share their design. Hope you don’t mind checking it out. There are now 35 members (mostly come from my country, Indonesia). Right now we have 32 themes shared. Thank You.