Gravatar Blog

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.

Howdy everyone! It’s been an exciting few months for us since we’ve taken on the role of helping Gravatar grow. We’ve been doing a lot of work to get those gears turning, and set things up for some serious forward motion.

The first thing we did, after stabilizing the service, was set out to rewrite Gravatar in PHP. Now before we launch into any holy wars I’d like to point out that our decision on this matter had nothing to do with Ruby, or Rails — in fact we have a great respect for both! The reason, the only reason, we switched is that PHP is our core competency at Automattic. As a PHP application we will be able to apply the sum total of our collective abilities to bear on any problems that Gravatar might face. The guys I work with are genuinely some of the most technically gifted people I know!

Of the things that you might notice there are a couple which will be most prominent. First off the speed of the user interface has increased dramatically especially when it comes to applying your uploaded imaged to your email addresses, a process which used to take minutes. We’ve fixed the biggest issue with the cropper (it would throw an error if you tried to use an image that was already 80×80 pixels or smaller.)

Now for some things that you probably have not noticed.

We have increased the size limit for avatars to 512 pixels (thats a big avatar!) With existing gravatars the image will be pixelated at 512, but new gravatars created from from higher resolution images will be very clear. For backwards compatibility the default size for serving images with no specific requested size will be the 80 pixel version.

You can now abbreviate the avatar.php options as follows: size=80 can be s=80, rating=PG can be r=PG, default=foo can now be d=foo. The rating is also case insensitive (r=PG is the same as r=pg). Oh and gravatar_id=foo can be g=foo, not that you’ll need it because we’ve implemented a new cleaner URL API. Our new API is actually really simple, and not a huge departure from the original URL structure.

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/767fc9c115a1b989744c755db47feb60

All of the aforementioned get parameters still work, such as ?s=80&r=g&default=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.mysite.com%2Fimage.jpg Also, for convenience and compatibility with certain software (for example some forum software won’t allow you to use a url as an avatar if it doesn’t have an image extension), you can append .jpg to the end of the MD5 of the email

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/767fc9c115a1b989744c755db47feb60.jpg?s=128&r=g

We’ve also added support for gravatar images over SSL (please use the hostname secure.gravatar.com for this)!

https://secure.gravatar.com/avatar/767fc9c115a1b989744c755db47feb60

We have lots more stuff planned to make Gravatar.com a great service for everyone, so stay tuned!

Thanks to Louis McGee for sending in a link to a Textpattern plugin which supports gravatar functionality (glx_gravatar). He comments that this is a more coder friendly (and upgrade-proof) way of implementing gravatar support for textpattern.

Michal, over at WebDevPros has put together the necessary information (and an md5 include) for using gravatars in your classic ASP applications. Check out the article here: http://www.webdevbros.net/2007/12/29/using-gravatar-in-classic-asp/. As always we’re thrilled to see more and more ways to make gravatar universally implementable. Great job, Michal!

Lucas Araujo wrote in to share his PHP gravatar class. Its fine work, and definitely worth a look (not to mention yet another example of the community really being the heart and soul of a project like this!)

Cory Wright wrote in with his method for generating Gravatar URLs in python (seems to require 2.5 or better.) It’s truly great when we get submissions like this. Not only do we get to see how people are using Gravatar, but we get to share that information to help other people who might be thinking about using Gravatar themselves!

# import code for encoding urls and generating md5 hashes
import urllib, hashlib

# Set your variables here  
email = "Someone@somewhere.com"
default = "http://www.somewhere.com/homsar.jpg"
size = 40

# construct the url 
gravatar_url = "http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?" 
gravatar_url += urllib.urlencode({'gravatar_id':hashlib.md5(email.lower()).hexdigest(), 'default':default, 'size':str(size)})

It’s been brought to my attention that there is a very cool Thunderbird plugin called MessageFaces which, after you enable the option in the plugin preferences, will show gravatars in the header section of the email messages you view. We happen to think that this is terrific, and one more example of how Gravatar can be used to bring a touch of personalization where there would otherwise be nothing but the cold feel of a whitewashed internet. Thanks very much to Jens Bannmann for writing this very cool plugin!

Mike wrote in with a link to one of his blog posts describing how he integrated gravatars into one of his Ruby on Rails projects. As always we appreciate the community coming together to fill in the gaps, and help each other. The blogging community can sometimes be a truly inspiring example of generosity and thoughtfulness! Thanks Mike!