Plurkshop #10: Unique Designs In The Plurk World

This Plurkshop was hosted on Saturday by yours truly, Charles Weber (thoughtwrong) of MyPleeps.com, on the topic, new implementation of custom CSS profile design . Remember that this is just a recap. For the full discussion, please visit the Plurkshop #10 thread.

This Plurkshop was based around a very controversial topic in the past week. The implementation of custom CSS design on your profile has had some astonishing comments that seemed to go through both good and bad views, and we thought that the time was upon us discuss this.

Starting off the Plurkshop I posted a list of a few related links. Those are as follows:

• Is Plurk The Myspace of Microblogging? - The seemingly controversial mashable post by Wayne Sutton
• I Saw It Through The Plurkline - Plurks blog post in response to the Plurkers reactions to the CSS topic.
• Plurk CSS - Great tips from our very own Zen Elements on the Plurk CSS and how to use it to your advantage.
• Project Plurk - our google group for an open source custom CSS generator
• Plurkcast (Special Friday Edition) - This episode of the Plurkcast is one of two where we discussed the custom CSS topic, and gathered peoples opinions on it.
• Plurk CSS Flickr Group - A Flickr group for sharing your profile design with others

Following the links the discussion started by asking what your Plurk profile design is really about. There seemed to be a general consensus that 90% of the time you are the only one that will be viewing your page. Sure you will have the occasional visitor to a specific thread of yours in which they will see your page. Sure some people will see your page when they view your profile to decide if they want to friend you or not. In turn you should make your page very user friendly (eg. clear and readable text), however it is not a necessity for you to base your page around their viewing pleasure. Pritchard Designs stated , ” I like that I’m looking at a representation of me while Plurking”

We then began into a discussion on the mashable link by Wayne Sutton and everyone’s standpoint on that most controversial post. The thoughts on this were as follows:

• IttyBites:  It was a move for controversy to get people to look at Plurk
• AmberCadabra:     I had much less issue with his comments on CSS than I did with his blanket statements about the community.
• Pritchard Design:    mashable post was a *verrry* narrow view of plurk
• Uberdev:    There is some validity comparing plurk and myspace. It seems the community for both is more homogeneous.

Tacky profiles was a side topic that spawned from this one and prompted people to ask if the custom CSS and bad design would impact your decision on friending or fanning someone. Bakla states that, “Tacky taste is universally relative. If you hate the tackiness, remove as friend.”

This question was brought up by Uberdev, “you like a person’s perspective, comments, contribution to community but not their plurk page style. friend or no friend?” The answer to this was almost unanimous as everyon spouted out with “friend”. It seems that despite bad design, ugly colors, and god awful stylesheets, content still is king. Pleeps on Plurk seem to enjoy the conversation more than anything else, and that is why we are all here. IttyBites said, ”    First impressions happen usually before I get to their profile page.”

Moving on I asked everyone what line of CSS code they have found most useful. Unfortunately this is also about the time Plurk started acting up on us so we only recieved 2 responses.

• Zen Elements: #input_small { height: 75px; } - adjusts the size of the response box in smaller Plurk windows on your timeline.
• Pritchard Designs: .q_hopes { background: #5c4294; } - ability to change the verb qualifier color.

Before it was all over, I let everyone know about the google group project we have going on. The group is called Project Plurk, and aims to be an open-source, community created, Plurk CSS generator. We plan to have the CSS generator and links to several new templated for all to use/tweek for their own custom Plurk page. I really hope this takes off and we can get the community to input as the more help we get in creation, the better this generator will be for all the pleeps.

Thats about the entire Plurkshop. Due to technical difficulties and Plurk being semi-slow that night I do not feel that we had ample time to discuss everything that needed to be discussed. Luckily Connie invited me back soon for a part two on this topic so be on the lookout and feel free to join in.

Filed under: Pleeps