Recently, I was perusing through the Talkshoe website looking for technology podcast. It was a early morning expedition to broaden my horizons and try something new for a change. I was almost to the point of giving up when I came across a live show called “Geek is Chic” hosted by iandrea. Upon joining in I was immediately able to participate, and so I asked what the show was about. Normally the show was about technology, but as it turns out that they were on a live 24 hour “podcastathon” in support of breast cancer awareness. I stuck around and started talking tech with them only to find out that they were all avid Plurk users themselves.

This is the kind of thing I enjoy about Plurk. I adore the fact that not only were they all Plurk users, but they were also coming together for a common good. This is what Plurk is all about; Community, Community, Community. I ask you all to never forget what a loving community we have here, and what helpful folks lie just within our grasp. *WE* make the difference!

I am Thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been pleeped!

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We as plurkers are a unique pleople! We all have different personalities and views. We all share our opinions and feelings with the world, and that’s what makes Plurk….well Plurk! So knowing this it makes since that our profile page should be unique as well. An essence of style that is each pleep in the plurkiverse. Unfortunately not many of us know or understand the fundamentals behind CSS so we use the same old default background for our pages. I feel there should be an easier way for the non-technical pleeps to accomplish this. Until that day comes, however, we must work with what we have, and what we have is a great site that explains exactly how to code certian parts of your profile page with CSS. I give you AZJazzyJ’s website Plurkskins.com.

Plurk Skin?
Well, first let me inform you that you will not learn basic CSS coding on this page (to learn that visit W3Schools). Instead what you will learn is quite a bit more valuable to the average Plurk user. AZJazzyJ has taken the time to delve through the Plurk CSS files, and pull out the most interesting tidbits of information to share with the Plurk community. He shows how to do things such as change the qualifier verb colors, add rounded Plurk boxes to your page, and much much more. He shares a lot of very interesting tweaks to your profile UI, and updates the site with new content all the time.

Is there anything at Plurkskins I should check out?
Well, being as I am a very busy man as most of you all may know I have not had the time to mess with the CSS in my profile recently. I will, however, share with you some of the Plurkskins blog posts that I have found interesting, and that will help you on your way to a spruced up profile page. My top 3 Plurkskins’ posts are as follows:

• Body and Time Line Theming
• Replacing the Loading Image in the Plurk Response Box
• Rounded Boxes Within the Dashboard

I hope these posts will help you on your way to create a little pice of yourself on your profile.

The End?
Well, not necessarily! Keep checking back with Plurkskins.com for all your Plurk profile CSS needs. What AZJazzyJ is doing is a marvelous addition to the Plurk world, and it is destined to help many people create more unique layouts for their profile. He updates the site regularly (its been every day as of late), and I am sure if there is something you would like to accomplish with your page he would be more than willing to help. So friend him, visit his site, and enhance your look and feel via Plurkskins.

I am Thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been pleeped!

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Lets take the most relevant definitions into consideration:

So-cial \ˈsō-shəl\ (adjective)
tending to form cooperative and interdependent relationships with others of one’s kind

Jour-nal \ˈjər-n^əl\ (noun)
an account of day-to-day events

So using these two words together we are proclaiming an account of day to day events with other people that we get along with. This is the true meaning behind Plurk. This is what sets Plurk apart from the rest of the “Announcement style” micro-blogging networks. Plurk has come a long way since I have been a member, and I anticipate all the changes that arise because I really want to see this fine group of programmers succeed with this service. I also have to say that they do a great job of explaining social journal. If you navigate to the Plurk main page and click on “Social Journal” you will see what I mean.

I have devoted my life since June by helping newcomers to Plurk, starting a website for the Pleeps, and just having a “Love Plurk” mentality. I really enjoy this service, and getting into college may make it to where I will not be able to be on as much as I have been. I have some other projects in the works as well and will be making announcements for those shortly. In comparison to other Plurk related sites, these projects are not to teach about Plurk, but rather to Tell about it. I want to share with the world my love for Plurk and I want others to experience what I have already had the chance to. I aspire to bring much more traffic to Plurk. That is my goal, my dream, and my definition of success.

If you are asking yourself why I am doing all this then I just have one answer. Social Journal! This, again, is what its all about. Time with friends, great people sharing great (and some not so great) things, and the overall sense of community. If this is the way you feel, if this is what peaks your interests then please join me when I release my new sites and help me spread the Plurk love!

We are here, We are the future, We are Pleeps!

-Thoughtwrong

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The one main problem with Cliques is the location of them on your timeline. At first I did not see them being mingled in with the private plurks as a big deal, but as my friends list grows I notice more and more every day that it is harder to distinguish the two. I find that a private plurk should be defined as a Plurk between you and one other person, where a Clique should be defined as a group of people and therefore should be seperate. Not only does these two being together in one tab limit ability to find Clique posts you want to respond on quickly, but it also seems to get your private plurks lost in the shuffle. I think that if there were seperate tabs for these it would make the UI navigation much more friendly, and also would allow for easy refrence to private plurks when they come available. This is a feature I recently suggested on Get Satisfactions Plurk Support Page. Go there and support it if you like the idea.

Minor Problem or Possible Bug

So off the topic for a second, it also seems that clique and private plurks only come up in your timeline if there is a response to it already. This can be fustrating, especially with private plurks that you havent responded to (unless the other person who is plurking responds to themselves). I propose that this may be a bug in the system as I do remember them coming up in my timeline before. If this was a removed feature then it is my suggestion that this one is added back as it can make getting your private plurks a whole lot easier, and in turn makes the UI a whole lot more friendly not to mention saving time. If it is a bug I hope that it gets fixed soon for all our sakes.

If you have any bugs you have found, or a suggestion that would improve overall usability of plurk I encourage you to leave a comment below. I will review them and send them on to the Plurk Support Page at Get Satisfaction, or you can head over there yourself and sign up for an account if you wish. Pleae note that if you are the one with the suggestion or bug and you wish for me to pass it on for you I will include your name and respectively give you credit for it. I just hope to give back to the community what I have recieved in the past couple months.

I am Thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been Pleeped!

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Now some of these tips contained here may be practical and things you already know, but please keep your attention focused as there are tips here that will blow your interviewers mind (trust me, I experienced it)

General Tips

• Eye Contact - This shows the interviewer that they have your full attention. Try not to lose eye contact for too long, especially if you are talking as that could be an indication of lying.
• Smile - No one wants a sad, depressed, or angry employee. Be sure to be polite, greet with a firm handshake, and be smiling the entire time. (a real smile, as people can tell when you are faking it.)
• Be Yourself - Don’t be fake, because nothing could be worse than your new boss finding out later that you are quite different from what you portrayed to them in the interview.
• Confidence - Employers want someone who is sure of themselves as they would be the best fit for any position that requires many tasks.

In-Depth Tips

• Be Early and Prepared - An employer likes someone who is on time and prepared because it shows them a glimpse of how you will be as a worker.
• Use Their Title - Wether it be Mr. Mrs. or just plain Miss, be sure to always use their title as it shows a sign of respect for your higher ups. Also try to use their name when answering a question as your answer will grab their attention more in doing so.
• Strengths, Weaknesses, and Future Goals -Have these planned out ahead of time and try not to be cliche.
• Ask Questions - Sure you are the one being interviewed but you need to know a little bit about what they expect from you as well. See the next section for some good question ideas.

Now I had a little trouble with the weaknesses part in particular. If you tell an interviewer that your weakness is say organization, and the job calls for a lot of that particular skill, that means you most likely wont get the job. Asking once again for my Pleep’s suggestions this is what I gathered. Be honest about your weaknesses. Do not pretend you have none because everyone does. Instead share how you plan to overcome them. Employers like problem solvers. Again, try not to be too cliche as employers will see right through that.

Questions

• What are the five most important challenges you must solve in the next twelve months, and how are you doing them?
• What kind of boss would you make? What can I learn from you?
• Suppose I’m a member of your team, it’s 30 days later and you tell me I’m doing a great job. What have I Accomplished?

I have to say, I really liked the very last question on that list. That one was suggested to me by Jane Chin, and was probably the one that stuck out in my mind the most. When I went into my interview I used that question and the two interviewers were stunned. They stated that it was a great question, and one they would likely use themselves in the future. Their answers to that question were nothing short of amazing either. That question prompted them to tell me that at least two of the questions they asked me were answered 100% correct. This is a great feat to get accomplished before you leave an interview.

In conclusion, there is so much you can learn from other people on a daily basis, and there are an immense amount of those wonderful people right here on Plurk. So get into the conversation, share your knowledge, and learn from others. I believe that this is the TRUE meaning of TEAMWORK!

If you would like to read more on this topic the Plurks referenced are here, here, and here

I am Thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been pleeped!

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Upon awaking this morning, I did what I do every other morning and jumped on Plurk (go figure)! This morning was different however because I seen a comment that caught my eye. I went to the link in the comment, and read the post about Trojan attacks on Twitter. After reading this and thinking about it for a while I remember something that was said a while back in a Plurkshop I hosted.

martinbogo says: I have a way of embedding a flash mp3 player. He goes on to state that it is a parsing bug on the part of the A-Team. (Note: he also states that he would not do it due to music on pages being annoying anyways)

Now, not knowing much about programming I can neither confirm or deny this fact, however if he can use an <embed> tag in a Plurk profile then this has me wondering if it is easier than we think to implement a virus onto a Plurk profile page. Can someone in fact use this parsing bug to their advantage? Can it really be that easy to hurt what all of us Plurkers work so hard to maintain on a day to day basis? Well, in the twitter article it seemed that it was just a misleading link to download a new version of Adobe Flash which is in fact a Trojan. Things like this are happening everyday in our online world. I believe that we need to step up and fight for our network. Again, I do not know if it is a possibility to implement a virus with this parsing bug out there, but I most definitely do not want to find out. So I felt I needed to bring this to the attention of the Plurk community and see what all the Pleeps think of this. If you have any information on viruses or bugs on Plurk, or if you can tell us if this is a possible scenario, then please leave a comment below. Its high time that we take action Before someone takes it on us!
I am thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been Pleeped!

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Plurk Tips -n- Tricks teaches you how to do cool stuff on Plurk. In today’s video lesson we teach you the new way to link and reply to user names in the Plurk response interface. This new feature was added on August 3rd, 2008.

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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.

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While most of the time Plurk rolls out features “on the fly” with little or no downtime, it is generally expected that eventually they will have to take the service down for maintenance. This downtime is important because not only are new features being implemented for all Pleeps alike, but also they may be providing critical security updates to keep us protected. Now while I realize that people view Plurk as a dependable service, please be assured that there can and will be downtime with any technology out there. We should look on the brighter side of things, being that Plurk has nowhere near the downtime that other services in the same field possess.

Patience, who needs it?

Well if you read this post in its entirety, you do! All this bickering and complaining about downtime will not cut it people. The Plurk developers are hard at work to provide an outstanding service to the community, and happenings like I saw Friday and early Saturday need to cease. We are all in here for the common good of Plurk and we should act that way and treat the devs and each other with respect while here. We have a bunch of Pleeps complaining about downtime and errors, and on top of that getting angry about it. Don’t let it dictate your expectation of what Plurk will become, and definitely don’t leave, because Plurk is all about the community and YOU are part of that!

I feel that people may have over-reacted a bit when Plurk came back online. So karma went down a little, and so what if there were a few bugs in the system that needed worked out? Be Patient! Give them time and remember that this is just a small team of developers working in their spare time (no this is not the only work they do.) to keep a large audience happy. Dont forget that they not only need to maintain the site, code, and design of Plurk, but also converse with the Pleeps to get a better understanding of what we all want. Being a plurker myself I know how much of a daunting and time consuming task this can be.

What we really need to do is show some appreciation for the devs as they have worked hard for us, Let us all take a moment, and give a little back, by posting what you like most about Plurk in the comments below. Tell the devs what, of all their hard work, you appreciate, and let it be known what an outstanding job THEY do.

My Recommendations (Not Gripes!) To The Devs!

While downtime is an essential part of the service, there are a few things that you all can do to mutually keep the Pleeps happy. My recommendations to Plurk are:

• Put these downtimes on the blog as soon as you know they are scheduled. If people know about the downtime coming up they are a little less likely to be upset about it.

• Like the old saying goes, “If it can go wrong, It will”. If it does happen to take over the maintenance time, update the blog post to reflect this and if possible give an estimated time when it will be back up.

I realize that you, the devs, are busy, so if you cannot take these small tips into consideration I completely understand. That is why they are just suggestions!

Concluding A Weekend

Well following the Friday incident the developers have, according to their blog post, given everyone +1.00 karma across the board and have introduced 3 new qualifier verbs (something Pleeps have been asking for a while now). To me it seems as they did have some problems and are very apologetic about them. They are trying their hardest to get back in good graces, with the Pleeps, by giving us rewards. Now I, just as much as anyone, love new features, but we should always love the Plurk devs for everything they do, and no matter what lets show some Peace, Love, Unity, Respect, and most of all Kindness.

PLURK IS FOREVER STRONG, and I am thoughtwrong

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Well it sure has been an exciting night. As you all may know Alvin (UI Lead) from the A-Team attended the Plurkcast this afternoon and they talked about apps, stats, and whats upcoming for plurk (Read more on this story here). Following all of this excitement, new features started rolling out one after the other.Here is a rundown of what we recieved from Plurk today.

New Features? Really?

Well, first I was viewing my Pleep’s timelines and I made a typo in one if the links. Now normally a typo will produce a boring error message and a picture of the A-Team, But NO!! Instead I was greeted by something that made me genuinely laugh to tears. This new Plurk error page is all-encompassing of the traditional Plurk nature.

The new page states:

“We are the world, We are Plurk creatures, We are the ones who make a brighter day for all the hoomans.”

And following the mini song there is a picture of all the Plurk creatures together. This is the funniest error page I have ever seen. I have to give credit where credits due. Someone has some mad skills!

Is There More?

Oh it isn’t over yet my friends. Next on the list we have the brand new Plurk mobile page. Okay, sure it looks the same as before, but take a closer look. Thats right, now the users of mobile Plurk can have a similar experience to those on the desktop version thanks to mobile Plurk now categorizing by “only your Plurks”, “friends and your Plurks”, and “private Plurks”.

Anything Else?

The only other thing I could manage to find was the fact that the little search icon now has the word “search” next to it. Not a big change, but a change none the less.

Is Change Good?

This is most definitely a good thing. This means several things for Plurkers:

Better Timeline Management
Interaction From The Road (Not Literally, Don’t Plurk and Drive)
More Mobile Users = More Friends
etc.

What I Am Grateful For…

What I love about Plurk is the fact that when you are least expecting it will be the time something new appears. I find that Plurk’s blog may be updated once in two weeks, yet they will push out little things to make us happy till the bigger features are ready to go live. The devs have so much talent, and they know what to do to keep us happy in the Plurk world. For this I am grateful!

Forget Me Not

Today in the world of Plurk there were some very exciting moments and interesting new content to be had. I am glad that we have such a dedicated and committed team of developers on our side. If it wasnt for the Plurk devs we would not have this wonderful place we like to call Plurk.

Future Mobile

So whats next? Is this a sign of more things to come for Plurk? Better management and access to your mobile page maybe? Maybe customized mobile pages? Maybe sort by Clique? Well, unfortunately I am just as in the dark as the rest of you and we will all just have to wait and see.

I am thoughtwrong, and you’ve just been Pleepd!

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