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Pageviews: I’m in the process of setting up this blog again and quickly implemented an avatar plugin which has a comment template, in time I will replace it with my own avatar plugin.
Finding the graphical icon of a person on the web can be troublesome for "others" like weblog owners like me, we can use the mybloglog icon if the user signed up there, the gravatar if we know the e-mail and the user has submitted his picture there, the favicon if we know the url and he has a website, we can use the avatar he or she uses on social networking portals, forums, personal websites, flickr albums, locally stored pictures etc…
Writing a plugin which takes in account the zillions of possibilities to scan for an avatar is useless instead it would involve in writing a large webapplication, writing it’s own xml webservice and then let end-users, like this weblog, profit from submitting the known information wherafter the web application would return an image (now here is your Gravavar+ business idea!) (unfortunately I don’t have the business money to handle the possible traffic).
An alternative that has been thought of: why don’t we add an extra tag to the html code of our blog which specify the avatar we want to use? The advantage is that we have complete control over our avatar, replacing it can be as simple as ftp-ing a new image and we could even script it so we could show a "look-me-as-santa-cliche-avatar" behind the dynamic code.
Currently we specify the favicon.ico of a website (which I haven’t even created yet for this new site) as:
1: <link rel="shortcut icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
2: <link rel="icon" href="http://example.com/favicon.ico" type="image/vnd.microsoft.icon">
(Where the second line is only needed if you want an advanced icon e.g. an animated one). This is the basis for the so called "favatar" (just google on it or see below).
So what keeps us from adding an extra line in the header? E.g.:
1: <link rel="avatar" href="http://edward.de.leau.net/images/avatar.gif" />
Ofcourse the Internet is a chain of like-minded people. Here is a list of common used avatar tactics / standards / usages. If you have a weblog or website you might add some of the code below to confirm to these standards:
pavatar http://pavatar.com/ 1 : include the tag pavatar instead. A Pavatar must be a 80×80 px in either PNG, JPG or GIF format. Here is also the neat idea of including it in the header and… there is discussion on changing the tag to avatar instead: http://pavatar.com/forum/forum_entry.php?id=13 . I now included this tag in my HTML header and I added it to my header via a new tag in the .htaccess file like so:
1: Header add X-Pavatar: http://edward.de.leau.net/avatar/edwarddeleau.png
open-id avatar I have added an avatar to my open-id page and added the 2 openid header tags to the HTML for this site, that may be handy. I would have to investigate on how to retrieve the open-id avatar from a website, but undoubtly there are already plugins written for this. There is a wide discussion on the usage on it found on the web. After adding the 2 HTML tags:
1: <link rel="openid.server" href="https://www.myopenid.com/server" />
2: <link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://edelwater.myopenid.com/" />
I can sign in anywhere by using just the url of this website, I had seen this before during the past months, but it’s good to finally have implemented it.
favatar The favatar 2 uses the favicon of a site as gravatar. There are a lot of pluging for it around. So… let me create a favicon anyway… hold on… there! Now we have a nice animated icon (thanks to htmlkit 6).
mybloglog avatar The mybloglog community (which delivers the sidebar goodie you see on many blogs) let’s end-users join communities around a weblog. So yes, you can sign up for my mybloglog community via the widget I’m going to add in a minute…. the avatar used can be requested via webservice and therefore used in the comments on the blog pages, which isn’t a bad idea, but, ofcourse, users need to be signed up with mybloglog to be seen. Since MyBlogLog is now part of Yahoo! In principle all requesters for a the icon could get it from any Yahoo Service since when you change your avatar it let’s you choose to change it for all Yahoo services you are signed up with.
blogcatalog avatar Via the username the avatar of a person can be retrieved via the blogcatalog API , since this also becoming more and more mainstream, with the widget popping up in many sidebars including this blog’s this is also a welcome resource for finding the correct avatar.
