Gravatar Blog

Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:

As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!

People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:

• Profile pages are completely public, and accessible via nice short links, for example http://gravatar.com/beau (get your link from the bottom of your profile page)
• We’ve improved our support for translations, and are now looking for your help to get the Gravatar website translated into as many languages as possible
• foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)
• You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!
• That old profile editor of ours was way too ugly and hard to use, so we’ve made it easier to use and to see what’s going on (and to add more options, such as…)
• Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass as the background:

As always, if you don’t want any of your information to be public, then please just log into your account and go to “Edit My Profile” to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!

Developers; get your developer hats on because there are some especially cool things coming for you soon 😉

Gravatar has always been about GLOBALLY Recognized Avatars. The Global part of that came from Gravatar being really simple to implement in almost any environment. Let’s see what we can do to make things global by being available in every language!

Previously, a few very helpful volunteers made sure that the Gravatar website was available in 14 different languages. There are now more strings to translate than ever (469 per language actually!), and so we’ve spent some time trying to make things easier to work with. Our buddies over at WordPress.com are hosting a GlotPress installation for us that will allow you all to contribute to the translation process online, with nothing but a web browser. All you need to do to get started is head over to the Gravatar project, log in using your WordPress.com/Gravatar account and start translating strings!

We’ve imported all previous translations to get things started, and you’ll find some nifty tools in GlotPress, including the ability to use Google Translate for a bit of a head start. Strings are also prioritized according to where they appear within the website (so that we get the most important ones translated first). If you’d like to work on a language that isn’t currently listed, please let us know via an email to support [at] gravatar.com and we’ll get things set up for you.

Once each translation gets near completion, we’ll get it online so that everyone can benefit from seeing the Gravatar.com website in their native language.

We’re really looking forward to making Gravatar even more global than ever with your help!

Have you seen Animoto? No? Go back a few words and click that link. Animoto is awesome. It’s a service that automagically creates a professional-looking video for you based on a bunch of photos (and/or video clips), synchronized to music of your choice. Take a look at some of their sample videos to see what I’m talking about.

I just found out today that Animoto have added Gravatar support, so now when you leave comments on a video over there, you’ll see something like this:

Nice!

CPAN was a pretty early adopter (outside of blogs) of Gravatar, and have been using them for quite a while to put a face to the name of the people who are developing the core modules of the Perl programming language. I just happened to come across this awesome page that I had to share, called The Faces of CPAN. It shows a page containing all of the Gravatars of members who have one. Very cool.

I’d love to see websites do something like this, showing their “community” of commenters via their Gravatars. Maybe I’ll write a quick plugin to do that…

We’re always really happy to see submissions from folks like you that make it easier to implement Gravatar within different programming languages, software packages, frameworks and tools. Recently we’ve received some more, so here’s a list of new implementations (which I’m also adding to the Developer Resources section of the site):

• Vincent Gabriel submitted a Gravatar extension for the Yii Framework,
• Steffen emailed us to tell us about an extension for the TYPO3 CMS,
• We were emailed a Django custom tag,
• Ralf Ebert submitted a new Java library.

Thanks everyone for submitting details and for helping spread Gravatar to become a truly Global avatar. If you know of any other implementations that we’re not aware of, please let us know in the comments!

I’m personally a big fan of StackOverflow, so I was excited to see them implement Gravatars for all of their users a while back. Now they’ve gone and done something even more amazing — temporarily replaced their Gravatars with UNICORNS! Read their full post for some details on the implementation, but basically it works like our Identicon, Wavatar and Monsterid default choices, generating a unique avatar based on your email address.

They even have their unicorn-generating-drop-in-Gravatar-replacement service online for everyone to try out. Here’s mine!

Maybe we should talk to the folks over there about this being a new default option on Gravatar.com?

Happy April Fool’s everyone 😉

You’ve been using Gravatar for a long time as a way to show a little bit of your identity around the web. Everywhere you dropped an email, be it a comment or the creation of an account, the owner of that website could choose to use your details to load up the picture that you’d decide to associate with that email address. Last night we rolled out the first step in bringing a whole lot more context and personality to your presence online.

You didn’t think the design update was the only change we made, did you? Every gravatar now supports the addition of full profile information against it, so that you can paint a much richer picture of who you are. You can upload a bunch of your favorite photos to your profile (they don’t have to be gravatars at all), and you can even verify your ownership of other online profiles and services. When you verify that you own something, people will be able to tell this is your account and not some imposter.

We’re continuing the tradition of complete openness that Gravatar  has been known for, so nothing you put into your profile will be locked behind proprietary APIs or a scary terms of service — what you choose to share in your profile will be open to the world.

You’ll find some cool features on the new profiles: you can have a gallery of your favorite photos, add a variety of contact methods, and link your other profiles. Every linked account is verified so you know it’s not an impostor, and we also might be able to do cool stuff in the future like aggregate your content or update your avatar in multiple places when you update Gravatar.

While we’re all getting familiar with this new system, you will only be able to view your own profile on Gravatar.com, so you’ll have a bit of time to spruce it up before we’re out of beta. Profiles will become public for everyone soon so make sure to check yours out and update it to include (or leave out) exactly what you want. If you remove all information from your profile, then other people will only be able to see your Gravatar, just like right now.

If you’re running a website that already uses gravatars, we’ll have some more information soon on how you can make the most of these new profiles!

Phil C. wrote in to let us know he’s developed a module to make Gravatars available within Phorum. Websites using Phorum software to run their forums can easily drop this Module into their installations, no customization required (although customization is easily supported). Check out the full list of features and grab the Module here. Thanks Phil!

A few days ago we released an updated look for Gravatar.com.  We really felt that the old front page was cramped, stuffy, and heavy.  So we worked hard to lighten it up, make it more immediately informative, and gave everything a little more room to breathe.  Playing a starring role on the new front page is our introduction video (which I like to call Gravatar, the Motion Picture.) Anyhow this is just a small update from Gravatar-land.  We hope you’ll enjoy the new look while we cook up some cool stuff for you in the future.

–DK

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.

1. 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.
2. 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

1. 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.
2. 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