rakaz

about standards, webdesign, usability and open source

Gravatars

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

I regularly look at the weblogs that link to mine. Simply because I want to know what people write about me, but also because they often contain very useful information. Today I came across Redemption in a blog and the journal of John Hicks, the creator of the Firefox logo.

Off topic: John, thanks for featuring my wallpapers in the sidenotes on your weblog. It’s quite an honour.

Both supported Gravatars, a neat little feature which was up till now entirely unknown to me.

From gravatar.com

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80×80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

I’ve decided to add gravatar support to my weblog too. If you want to comment on one of my entries simply include your email address in the right field of the comment form and you gravatar will automatically appear next to your comment. If you’re worried about giving out your e-mail address, don’t worry. It will not be displayed anywhere on this website and I am never going to give them out to anybody.

In order to achieve support for Gravatars in Nucleus, I’ve created a little Nucleus plugin. It’s GPLed and can be downloaded from the Nucleus Plugins section of this website.

14 Responses to “Gravatars”

  1. Tom Werner wrote on November 21st, 2004 at 6:44 pm

    I love the way you’ve implemented gravatars on your blog. Quite clean.

    Would you mind if I added a link to your Nucleus Gravatar plugin to the Implementor’s Guide at gravatar.com? I’m trying to make it as comprehensive as possible.

  2. rakaz wrote on November 21st, 2004 at 6:54 pm

    Tom: no problem… link to anything you want.

  3. Rogier wrote on November 21st, 2004 at 9:01 pm

    Yes indeed very clean.

    Very nice site overall as well.

    And I love those wallpapers!

  4. Daniel Schierbeck wrote on November 22nd, 2004 at 5:26 pm

    Wohoo, I have a gravatar!

  5. John Oxton wrote on November 22nd, 2004 at 7:24 pm

    I just love this design, it is amazing!

  6. Glacial wrote on November 24th, 2004 at 6:36 pm

    Say hello to Gravatar!

  7. Chu Yeow wrote on November 25th, 2004 at 4:12 am

    I love your Firefox wallpapers – I’ve had one on my office desktop since I first saw them. And great work with the Nucleus plugin. Finding someone who can design AND code is so rare I just gotta say I’m amazed by your work here.

  8. Glacial wrote on November 25th, 2004 at 5:34 pm

    Can i "stole" your gravatar’s default?
    If you disagree, mail-me and i change it … Thanx a lot!

  9. frank wrote on November 27th, 2004 at 7:26 pm

    You have the best get firefox avatatars – mind if I use one?

  10. frank wrote on November 27th, 2004 at 11:51 pm

    Well too late.

  11. Que~ wrote on December 2nd, 2004 at 2:51 am

    TY for the Gravitar tip. :)
    This feature was entirely unknown to me as well.
    I’m a developer for e107 which is a CMS written in php/mysql started by my good friend Steve aka (Jalist). Since reading your post here, I’ve signed up at gravatar.com and started adding the required code to our avitar system on http://e107themes.com, makeing it gravitar aware. If all goes well perhaps I can get this code into CVS befor our next release..

  12. zcorpan wrote on December 18th, 2004 at 5:32 pm

    How about Favatars?

  13. kostia wrote on April 16th, 2006 at 9:55 pm

    I know it’s been out there for an awfully long time, so this problem may just be me, but when I tried to install your Gravatar Nucleus plugin, it wouldn’t work. After a little investigation, I discovered the permissions on NP_Gravatar.php were set to 600, unreadable by group/world. Changing it to 644, readable by all, which was what my other plugin files were set to, got it working. If this isn’t an isolated incident, it might be helpful to others to set the permissions on the linked file ahead of time. Thanks for a great plugin (and for beautifying the world with such a lovely blog design!).

  14. Pavel Jaroš wrote on September 6th, 2007 at 1:38 am

    Sorry that I’m writting here, but I have problem with your Nucleus plugin NP_Gravatar. There is no support of characters with diacritic (such as ěščřžýá) in the name of user. Maybe you will understand me better, when you take a look at title of my avatar of this comment or for example at this comment: http://jaros.ezin.cz/item/jak-mi-blogovani-zmenilo-zivot#c1
    Sorry for my poor english.