What has been going on in the world of Gravatar
August 10, 2009 | Posted by apokalyptik
Coming Soon to a Theater Near You
Now you can watch Gravatar, the motion picture! Which was put together by the ever helpful Michael Pick. If you’ve ever had trouble explaining exactly what Gravatar.com does to your friends, family, neighbors, long lost friends, and that dude down the street, then this is the screen cast for you!
404 Gravatar Not Found?!
It may not be a groundbreaking feature, but there is some a small new addition to the Gravatar API. You can now specify a default value of 404 to make the image… well… return a 404 not found error if there is no image for the given email address. This probably wont change the life of you website developers out there, but it just might make it easier for you application developers (you know… the people who have to actually compile their code before it works…)
Did You Know?
Today we have TWO “Did you know” tidbits for the price of one.
- This little tidbit is often a surprise for developers to find out, but you can use https://secure.gravatar.com/ [...] to link to an SSL encrypted Gravatar. This is especially useful when linking using Gravatars from SSL encrypted web pages.
- You can pre-fill the email address in sign up form for Gravatar.com to make it a little bit easier for your users to know what to do. Just add the email address to the end of the sign up URL like so.
Sightings in the Wild
- Where.com’s “WHERE wall” web service has been using Gravatars since the word “GO” for displaying user avatars. They had one small hiccup, but we got in contact with the developers (who were super nice and down to earth, by the way) to get the situation rectified.
- We recently heard that doMelhor (which, I’m told, is the leading Portuguese digg clone) recently enabled Gravatar support for avatar display.
That’s all I have for now but, as always, there is more to come from Gravatar.com
Cheers!
DK
joint
Suneel Says:
August 11, 2009 at 3:48 am
Gravatars are an excellent addition to already popular WordPress. Placing a face to an unknown person’s name is surely helpful in realizing the importance of people in this hitech age.
Jared Spurbeck Says:
August 11, 2009 at 7:30 am
I really like Gravatar, but the fact of it’s being proprietary software worries me. Is it really in my best interest to have my online avatar controlled by one company, even one as cool as Automattic? Why can’t it be something more like OpenID, with a variety of different providers?
I’m using it right now because it’s, well, automatic for a lot of weblogs, and it seems to be tied in to my current WordPress theme. I beg its developers to open it up, though, and make it possible for us to use our own Gravatar servers. It’ll save you bandwidth, bring bunches more developers to help with your project, and keep our user / developer relationship voluntary instead of forced.
SPDworks Says:
August 11, 2009 at 1:08 pm
A bit like a masquerade party, the web and networking through it, Gravatar helps genuine people to keep a face that’ll get them in and invited to more of the exclusive get-togethers, such as seminars both on and off-line. I love Gravatar for its ease of use and its great team of helpful developers. That it’s available for WP, Silverlight and with .NET controls is just icing on the well-layered cake that is Gravatar’s roots in universal and thoughtful development for web users world-wide:)
Otto Says:
August 11, 2009 at 5:31 pm
Are you ever going to add a reasonable way to tell if a given gravatar exists or not? Not everybody is wanting to get back some default, I’d like to be able to say “here’s an MD5, all I need is yay or nay that this avatar exists”. Preferably via JSON, so I can do this in javascript.
I’ve been trying to make an easy way to get my gravatars into my Google account as images for people, but without some way to tell, this turns out to be impossible.
Otto Says:
August 11, 2009 at 5:33 pm
Oh, okay, so I missed the 404 response, which is awesome, however this doesn’t help me for javascript applications.
Guess I’ll have to do it in PHP then.
putush Says:
August 12, 2009 at 8:10 pm
I love Gravatar. It takes off that pain of uploading new profile pics constantly. I just wish there was wider support for it. How could website builders be so blind to what is obviously a tremendous boost to user acknowledgement.
Guess it will take time.
wiselier Says:
August 17, 2009 at 2:39 am
Thank you; a very much.
Gravatar.com Site Gets Updated, Video Released | The Blog Herald Says:
August 21, 2009 at 9:47 am
[...] but the service supports a lot of other platforms as well. Check out the refreshed website and the blog post that talks about everything but just the new [...]
Dustin Graham Says:
August 29, 2009 at 11:52 pm
Just finished enabling Gravatars on my own website. Just wanted to suggest creating some icons and content for people to place on their sites to link to this site. What I’m saying is, most of my users are not common internet savvy people, but I imagine some will sign up for gravatars, but when I went looking for some “Powered by Gravatars” images/logos I didn’t find any. I ended up creating my own which you can see if you visit one of the articles on my site. It’s essentially the gravatar G with a “Powered by Gravatars” simple and sweet, but it may convince people to check it out.
So, I think if you created a few logos and linking text for people that don’t know what a gravatar is, it’d be easier to figure out. I had to view the source code over at zen-habits to figure out how they did their avatars, that’s how I found gravatar!
-Dustin
zetha13 Says:
October 1, 2009 at 4:42 pm
good!!
chaosmieze Says:
October 19, 2009 at 12:12 pm
I have no PC only internet with handy and it’s a problem to become the pic that i whant as my gravatar.
swapadog Says:
November 22, 2009 at 3:34 pm
all I can say is…what a great idea you have here!