Gravatar Profile Icons
I found out about Gravatar icons through Shabooty’s Madness. He started talking about tiny blue squares that he saw in his comments on Haloscan. I’ve noticed them in different sites and was curious myself. He had the answer. They were part of Haloscan’s new code that hadn’t made it to the Beta yet. They were Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars).
If anyone is clueless, these things show a picture that you choose to match your email address when leaving a comment. Many different sites can support Gravatars. Haloscan just seems to be the latest one that does it. People have started to catch on to the craze and submitted there own gravatars to be reviewed. It sometimes takes a few hours or even a few days, but it adds your personal touch when leaving a comment.
Shabooty also pointed me to a post on the Gravatar Blog offering a chance to win a free iPod mini since they now have 100 million gravatars. Thanks buddy!
One small problem that Suki mentioned is that she uses a spam-guard with his email address. Let’s take a look at my email address so that I can explain better. My email is lewismoten@gmail.com. If I wanted to prevent my email from being read from spammer programs surfing the web, I may add something to it so that a reader would know that they should remove a portion of the email before they send it (lewismoten-delete@gmail.com).
Gravatar confirms your email address before setting up an account for you. This becomes problematic for people like Saki. My suggestion to Gravatar.com is to support spam-guards and allow its users to enter there own custom spam-guard email that they use.
Going through my exported comments, I found the following users had left there email address. I was able to convert the email address into the MD5 hash used for the gravatars and Walla! Instant gravatars.
Not everyone has a gravatar. In this case, you will see a default image that I created. By the way, I only show PG-rated gravatars. As usual, I also calculated how many comments each person (using unique email addresses) has left on my blog and linked back to there site if they provided a Url.
I also have a program available to generate this HTML from a HaloScan Xml Export file if anyone is interested. I can send you the installation program, or just send you the source code in VB.Net (or C#). Just say the word if you are interested.
Ok, when I first posted this message, I had 35 people with approved PG-Rated gavatars for the emails that I have on file. I want to see some of you start getting your gravatars.
March 9th, 2005 at 10:10 am
Isn`t mine beautiful
It`s at a Hanshin Tigers Baseball game.
March 9th, 2005 at 7:01 pm
I allowed Rated-X gravatars on mine but I’ve yet to see anything special
thx for the hat tippage btw
you should submit this post here
might win an ipod shuffle
March 9th, 2005 at 7:18 pm
nice, except i spamguard my email address
March 9th, 2005 at 8:12 pm
Now that would be cool to support spam guarding. Telling Gravatar.com all the different spam-guards you use would be an interesting feature.
March 10th, 2005 at 4:47 am
Lewis, what’s the deal with that Exif metadata package I downloaded somewhere that you seem to have written? I’m looking for an example of how to suck Exif data out of jpgs, can I find it in that source? Gracias mi amigo.
March 10th, 2005 at 5:09 pm
Hey, thanks for the info
March 10th, 2005 at 5:39 pm
I thought mine was OK…
March 10th, 2005 at 10:00 pm
I just discovered this myself a few days ago. Very cool indeed!
March 11th, 2005 at 7:32 am
Hey, I’m a SHE… Of course, if you visited my blog, you would see that. :p
March 11th, 2005 at 7:51 am
Cool little toy. Thanks for the heads up
March 11th, 2005 at 8:09 am
Sorry about that Suki. It’s fixed now.
March 11th, 2005 at 7:22 pm
ididit
March 19th, 2005 at 10:30 pm
I ordered my today.