Plurk me, Parse me

Plurk, it’s all the buzz. What have you heard? How it’s the cool new chat tool? How it’s got a neat creature? Or how Karma rules the roost? But have you heard about the chat parser?

Parser? Yes, it’s what runs over and processes the words you type in your plurk or comment. It turns your text into rich goodness, and you didn’t even know it. Let’s look at some of the obvious ones.

**this** becomes **this**

*this* becomes *this*

__this__ becomes this

Pretty nifty huh? Well there’s a few more tricks in there. The next two are nifty and less obvious.

In the chat window to create a plurk, there are several options, such as says, and wishes. There is also freestyle. The last allows you to type any text. What happens if you type says or wishes though? You get the plurk version just as if you’d selected it.

The next one is about linking someone’s name. If you want to link tojosan for example, simply putting an @ in front does the trick.

tojosan with an @ at front becomes tojosan. The @ disappears.

Did all of that overwhelm you? Well here’s a final trick for sharing URLs without having that overly long string in there. It’s another markup trick. Here we go.

URL[space](link text)

ex http://amazon.com (Amazon – The online store) becomes Amazon – The online store

ex http://plurk.com (Plurk – your life on the line) becomes Plurk – your life on the line

The key is to type out the URL then a space, followed by a (, then the link text you want, then close with a ). Go ahead, try a few. It’s easy once you see it.

As a shortcut, this also works www.plurk.com (The Plurk) becomes The Plurk.

So there you have it, a bag of Plurk goodness to play with in your chats. Go forth and chat with gusto. Come back and share your tips and tricks with the rest of us.

Happy plurking!