Ryan Rampersad's Chronicles
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Stop Losing Plurk Karma

If you’re going on vacation or you’ll be having an abnormally busy week and won’t be able to Plurk like you normally do, you can temporarily freeze your karma.

Freeze Your Plurk Karma

Freeze Your Plurk Karma

That’s right, I said it. Stop Karma Loss, like Stop Hair Loss, but for Plurkers. It’s easy to do once you know where to find it but honestly, I think Plurk should make it easier for people to find. You can find it at the bottom of the settings page.

You check the checkbox and you confirm your absence. I’ll warn up front though that doing so will cause you to lose 1 karma point which is probably to deter people from abusing the feature. Also, the delete button is just a bit below the I’m on vacation, hold the karma button so be careful to not click that.

Keep Your Karma

Keep Your Karm

I haven’t used the feature yet but I imagine that if you plurk, your vow of silence will be broken and you’ll back to losing karma for idle hands. A lot of plurkers no doubt have laptops or some other mobile way of connecting to Plurk but I’m sure this will help people anyway.

Reply to a Plurk via Google Talk

If you have setup your Plurk account to accept messages through Google Talk, you’ll know that it is an excellent time saver if you continuously have quick access to a Google Talk outlet.

Respond To Plurks

Respond To Plurks

One thing that has always bugged me about the Plurk through GTalk experience is how I wound up going back to the web interface every time I wanted to reply to a plurk. I was looking around for a solution and it was really quite easy.

Plurk sends you a message when a reply is sent to you initially along with the plurk’s plurk id. You can append a hash to it, one of these, #, to send the message after it as a comment to the root plurk. The general form for this response feature is like this:

To post a response to a specific plurk, just send #[unique number] [response text]

You can see my example too. Go Plurk!

Plurking via Google Talk

I just found out that you can plurk from Google Talk and MSN.

All you have to do to set this up is follow this link, you’ll need to be logged in clearly, and it’ll ask you which service you want to sign up to. Then, once you type in your Gtalk/MSN email address, a buddy request from PlurkBot will come to you waiting for you to accept. Once you do, you’ll have to enter your plurk username for confirmation as a message to PlurkBot.

Plurk Via Google Talk

Plurk Via Google Talk

PlurkBot has a bunch of options that allow you to turn off notifications about other’s plurks and replies and more. You can also set individual options per plurker in your plurk control panel. Isn’t that nice?

I think feature is really quite handy since loading plurk is sometimes pretty daunting.

Plurk could be risking it

I think Plurk could be risking it. Apparently, they now allow everyone, from sign up, to edit the CSS in their profiles. That’s wonderful for the honest people in the world. However it’s not a good thing for those more malicious.

In Plurk’s Styling Tutorial, they show users how to edit their CSS and even recommends Firebug. That’s fine, until at some point, they show a theme they made, I guess. It’s a good looking theme and all, however, it is troubling that the image for the background is on some external site!

If they’re allowing unfiltered backgrounds in their CSS, what other things could they allow? If I get an image into that space, I could track everyone who visits my page by using a simple PHP script, and some geolocation service. If I go farther than that, I might even inject some javascript into the CSS and hope for the best, I mean worst. So in other words, it’s an insignificant XSS vector. I don’t know if it is really, but it could be.

© 2021 Ryan Rampersad's Chronicles.