Recently I came across a Greasemonkey userscript which adds a gravatar image to every mailto: link on a web page. Clever use of interesting technologies by docwhat.  Very cool!

Seems the guys working on DotNetNuke have added support for Gravatar!  Rip Rowan brought this to our attention in a recent comment, and we’re looking forward to helping to provide avatars for all those DNN sites.  Keep up the good work guys!

The folks at comment tracking service Intense Debate have rolled out Gravatar support.

Now all Intense Debate users can choose to use a Gravatar instead of upload a file for their avatar. Just enter your email address and you’re done. Couldn’t get much simpler than that.

Gravatars used through Intense Debate appear on all comments that a user makes on every site powered by Intense Debate, along with links to the user’s social profiles and other info — all of which goes along nicely with the “global” in Gravatar.

For more details, check out the post over on Inside the Debate.

After a lot of tinkering, fiddling, poking, and prodding we’ve revamped the image support in gravatar. Now if you upload a GIF or a PNG we will preserve any transparency that might be in the image and serve that image to you as a PNG.

Unfortunately this does not retroactively fix existing images with black instead of transparent backgrounds. You’ll want to re-upload your transparent images, assign the new image to your email addresses. After that, give it about 30 minutes and clear your cache. Everything should work and look just fine.

A note for all you webmasters out there: If you’re worried about what transparent PNG images look like for your IE visitors, I would recommend taking a look at this handy Transparent PNGs in Internet Explorer 6 page which offers an explanation, information on workarounds, and a drop-in javascript which will work for all the images on a page.

Until next time – happy blogging!

We recently came across this screencast that Chris made: Is your Avatar a Gravatar? and we think he did a terrific job of breaking down what gravatar is, and what it does! It’s really awesome

The only thing that we’d like to mention is that gravatar is not specific to WordPress, developers are free to use gravatar for anything. We’ve seen gravatars in non-blog web pages, in lots of different programming languages, and even in desktop applications!

So…

*IS* your avatar a Gravatar?

WordPress.com users now have more avatar options, to choose the new defaults we talked about previously.

Those options will also be included with WordPress 2.6!

Also — the PNG thing is on our radar. Will have to change some things up to make it work again, but it’s just code.

Michael S. writes in to share with us two tidbits. The first is that there is now a Gravatar CPAN module (which is cool enough all on its own!) And that they have a very cool page allowing you to see “The Faces of CPAN” via their gravatars (CPAN has supported gravatars for their authors for a while now). Both of these are great finds. Awesome code! Awesome Ideas! Keep up the good work CPAN team!

The Disqus commenting system now has Gravatar support!

We know that some sites don’t always appreciate the big blue G being all over their comments sections. Many sites use the default option to give their non-gravatar-able comments a feeling of continuity with their site design, but we’ve heard you calling out for more. It’s not ideal that anyone who isn’t “in” doesnt get to be unique.

For the community member Gravatar should be able to give you an implicit identity, letting you customize it explicitly from there. For the site owner Gravatar should give your site a feeling of community, helping to solidify your hard work by giving your members a face, some semblance of permanence.

Looking around at the existing wordpress plugins for inspiration we found these three exceptional projects: WP_Identicon, WP-MonsterID, and the Wavatars plugin. We decided to take the truly inspiring work that these projects have done, and internalized those ideas into gravatar. Now you will be able to specify a &default= value of wavatar, monsterid, or identicon to produce results like these:

identicon

wavatar

monsterid

default

Please let us know if there are others that you think would be worth supporting. And again: Kudos to the authors of these plugins for their hard work and brilliant ideas!

The latest version of the SezWho comment rating and reputation system now has built-in Gravatar support.