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For all your blog visitors without a Gravatar…

Written on 9th January 2009 7 COMMENTS
Ernst-Jan Pfauth, editor in chief

There’s a new breakthrough in the battle against the blank avatars in the comments section of a Gravatar-compatible blog. Smashing Magazine asked Ricardo Sousa, a young designer with a strong passion for WordPress and Joomla!, to develop a plugin that pulled the avatar from a different service.

Have you ever heard of that micrblogging service Twitter? Supposedly, quite a lot of blog readers are active over there. Hence Sousa’s decision to compare a commenter’s email address with Twitter. If the plugin finds a similar email address, it displays the Twitter avatar. Genius, uh?

Here’s how it looks. Like it? Download the plugin from Smashing Magazine.

Add a few more services and the blank Gravatars are history. By the way, we’ll include avatars in our upcoming redesign. Stay tuned, happy blogging.

7 Comments »

About the author: Ernst-Jan is blogger and co-organizer of BLOG08, who previously worked in New York to cover news at the United Nations. Next to writing, he's also a singer in the band Christina Five. Follow him on Twitter or read his personal blog Dutchproblogger.com .

7 comments/trackbacks to “For all your blog visitors without a Gravatar…”

Jan 12, 2009: IndianGuru (Satish Talim)
Reading: For all your blog visitors without a Gravatar…http://tinyurl.com/7sll9z

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Apr 13, 2009: Digital Scrapbook Kits
[...] For all your blog visitors without a Gravatar… (thenextweb.com) [...]

By Jerry on Jan 9, 2009

Does the twitter-integration overrule your handpicked gravatar?

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By David Petherick on January 9th, 2009:
Jerry, I think the answer is yes. If you have a twitter account, it overrules the gravatar.

Oddly enough, I was writing on my own blog today about the very same widget, and the growth in the area of integrating twitter into blogs.

I noted another nice Twitter-related plugin recently – http://www.improvingtheweb.com.....eet-stats/ adds two widgets to your site: “Most Tweeted Posts” and “Recently Tweeted Posts”.

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By Jerry Houtman on January 9th, 2009:
Thanks David

nice plugins too, I think I´ll ask our chief to implement those…

Ernst? ;)

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By Ruben Fonseca on Jan 10, 2009

Don’t call that piece of junk a “plugin”. Looking at the README it’s *hugly* hack envolving _direct edit_ of wordpress code which is, at least, evil.

Also, a quick look at the code shows that for each comment on an article, the PHP runtime has to make an external HTTP fetch before generating the necessary HTML… Enough said?

Merit to the idea though..

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By Ricardo Sousa on January 11th, 2009:
Ruben,

We could talk in Portuguese but like we are in a english website i think we should talk in English.

This first release was a test for both concept and receptivity of the plugin.
The way it works now is the more efficient one?
NO!
It works?
YES!

I am willing to accept any suggestions to my work as im doing @SmashingMagazine even because i don’t have the years of experience or the expertise that you may have. At Smashing users are commenting that this is not the efficient way to do it but they are doing it with the intent of improving it. Instead of calling other peoples work “a piece of junk” you may try to suggest better implementations and try to improve it or at least explain in a nice way what you mean by junk. At least i think you should. I’m not better than you neither i want to be. I want to learn as i did for the last year(s).

Regarding the issues you point out i’m working on them, i’ve contacted twitter and we will try to find a better way to do things. A new version should be out by the middle of the week with all this problem solved and a couple of new features added.

Hope that’s enough to make it less “junky”.

Ricardo

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