While I was searching for a suitable background for my Veteran's Day theme I came across another background image that really touched me. I've therefore created a second Veteran's Day theme with this background as well. This version features members of the Green Berets as they salute their fellow soldiers and their flag. This simple action should be a reminder to all of us how indebted we are to those who served their country.
As I was thinking about all of the freedoms we enjoy I began to think that perhaps it might be appropriate to create a theme for Veteran's Day to pay tribute to those who have defended our liberties. From the comments that I have received I decided this theme would be a great candidate to share with others so that they too can show how important Veterans have been to our way of life.
As I work through the CSS code for Plurk I sometimes begin to question how things work and whether I can modify them for my own warped use. Since I try not to introduce this madness onto the unsuspecting masses I usually end up updating my own personal profile theme. Sometimes I'll have people ask if I would please share the code so that they too can us it. I'm always more than happy to provide whatever help I can so every so often I'll include a post where I will give you the code from my profile page that you are free to use.
Over the course of the last 24 hours the Plurk development team rolled out several new features to the Plurk community. Many of these were welcomed additions but a few of them had an undesirable impact. It was definitely one of those good news/bad news kind of things. The good news is that the features introduced are great additions to an already good product. The first new functionality was the inclusion of a "Block User" button to the user's profile. You now have the capability to block a user directly from their profile. This has been something that the user community has been asking about for quite some time so it's inclusion brought a lot of joy from the user base. The default graphic is a red square button so you can bet that I'll be covering how to theme that in an upcoming tutorial so it matches the style and color scheme of your profile page. The second new feature that was introduced was the ability to follow or friend someone directly from the friend/fan page. This again brings great strides in usability to the interface. Both of these show that the developers are definitely listening to the users which is one of the best reasons for using Plurk versus one of the other micro-blogging services.
Now for the bad news. I should probably preface this by saying this isn't necessarily bad news just that it had implications to a lot of users that were somewhat unexpected. In an effort to make Plurk faster and more scalable, the development team made several changes to the CSS files. These changes should make things run a little faster as the files have been optimized at least initially. As a result several areas may have broken if you have modified or customized your CSS profile.
From first glance it appears the changes have impacted the following:
While I was writing the tutorials on the Dashboard Buttons I noticed that Plurk had created a new box below the main input field to select Private Plurks, define the language of the Plurk, and allow the user to set options on the message. This used to be just a text link but now has the appearance of being a button. They added an icon of a padlock to the left side. Unfortunately the orange background color they used clashes with just about every known color on the planet. It was clear that something needed to be done with that and quickly so I created this short tutorial that will make this area more aesthetically pleasing.
In part 4 of the series on modifying the buttons we are going to turn our focus back to the dashboard as we make some changes under the Friends and Fans segments. Plurk recently made some changes to the buttons included in these sections many of which don't work well with our theme. There are large buttons for Inviting friends to Plurk, a leather looking section containing the URL for sharing your Plurk link, and three rotating buttons for embedding your Plurk widget, finding friends on Twitter, and a link to the Plurk mobile page. There are also two text links for showing all of your friends and showing all of your fans. Through the next two tutorials we will be modifying all of these to provide a look and feel to these buttons that will add some style to your theme. These tutorials can be followed individually or done in series to get the full effect for all of these changes. This is part 4 of this series and will focus on the Share your plurk page area. Part 1 in this series is titled Create Dashboard Buttons for Twitter Contacts, Widget, Mobile, Part 2 of this series is titled Create Dashboard Button for Invite Friends and Part 3 of this series is titled Create Dashboard Buttons for Show All Friends, Show All Fans.
In part 3 of the series on modifying the buttons we are going to turn our focus back to the dashboard as we make some changes under the Friends and Fans segments. Plurk recently made some changes to the buttons included in these sections many of which don't work well with our theme. There are large buttons for Inviting friends to Plurk, a leather looking section containing the URL for sharing your Plurk link, and three rotating buttons for embedding your Plurk widget, finding friends on Twitter, and a link to the Plurk mobile page. There are also two text links for showing all of your friends and showing all of your fans. Through the next two tutorials we will be modifying all of these to provide a look and feel to these buttons that will add some style to your theme. These tutorials can be followed individually or done in series to get the full effect for all of these changes. This is part 3 of this series and will focus on making buttons from the Show All Friends and Show All Fans text links. Part 1 in this series was titled Create Dashboard Buttons for Twitter Contacts, Widget, Mobile and Part 2 of this series is titled Create Dashboard Button for Invite Friends.
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