Gravatars = Globally recognized avatars

Posted on July 20, 2007  by Mikko Ohtamaa
Filed Under Red innovation, Wordpress, avatar, blogging, gravatar

When travelling in Blogosphere you will be recognized, besides by your nick, by your avatar. Avatar is “user icon”, an user chosen image shown next to his/her comments. This little cheerful image brings a whole new dimension of feeling into otherwise so dull textual messages.

In the past, it has been a problem to register and upload your image to every site you visit. Not anymore. Gravatar is a service where one can register globally recognized avatar for himself/herself. An image is associated to an email address and every time you post somewhere with this email services, your avatar image is automatically fetched from gravatar.com. Simple and cool. The Gravatar images have even age limits!

Of course, this requires Gravatar support from the service you are posting into. But since the service is free and has received good community feedback, we can expect seeing more Gravatars in the future. To help the progress of the world, I added Gravatar support for blog.redinnovation.com. You are welcome to comment our blog with your Gravatar image to see whether this service works.

Also, I found a little bug from ZenPax’s Gravatar2 plug-in for Wordpress. Wordpress 2.2 rich text editor was sanitizing XML mark-up used in blog posts. Gravatar2 plug-in used misformed syntax in its “place your Gravatar to post” code. Gravatar2 was cleaned away. Here is required changes you need to do to make the plug-in work with Wordpress 2.2.

In function gravatars_in_post() change line (1055) beginning with preg_match_all to

preg_match_all("/<gravatar>([^<]+)</gravatar>/", $content, $matches);

Now you can place Gravatar images to the blog post. In the Wordpress rich-text editor, toggle Code view and use following tag:

<gravatar>youremailaddress@internet.com</gravatar>

Voilá!