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!