So I was perusing Joshuaink, John Oxton’s splendidly autumnal blog, and spotted something quite cool in his comments. Some of the commenters had small images next to their names, making the comments easy to scan for your favourite personality.
In itself this is not a new idea – many message boards are littered with such images (known as avatars) and some blog authors have implemented their own system – Malarkey pins badges to groups of commenters and Dave Shea has experimented with colour coding certain names. What’s different with Joshuaink is that John has implemented Gravatars – globally recognized avatars. This means the avatar images are pulled from a central repository and follow the commenter from blog to blog. If a commenter changes their avatar, this change is immediately reflected across those blogs.
Tom Werner, the creator of Gravatars, has put a lot of thought into the system. A commenter is identified by email address, but the system always uses MD5 encryption so email addresses are never exposed. Before being unleashed to the world, uploaded images are manually checked and rated along the lines of US movie ratings (G, PG, R, X) and blog authors can then say which ratings they will accept. Authors can also say what size avatar they wish to show (up to 80×80) and the image will be bicubically resized accordingly. There are plug-ins for all major blogging systems as well as instructions for PHP, Perl, Python, Java and Cold Fusion.
The only thing that concerns me is the scalability (particularly financially). At the time of writing Tom has served over 7 million gravatars (since release in late July) and rates all the uploads himself (he says he can do 30 a minute). Hopefully, as the system grows in popularity it can survive on donations and volunteers. Either way I like it and Gravatars have been enabled here on Clagnut.
Rich wrote:
See that little fella on the left? That’s my gravatar that is. Note that it’s not actually me, it’s really a chap who seems unnervingly pleased to have been told that seminal emissions at night are natural.
sil wrote:
knew there was something I’d seen recently and not implemented. :)
Tim wrote:
I uploaded my avatar to gravatar ages ago, but I never got around to implementing it on my site. I’ve never seen it in action; here goes, then…
Jemaleddin wrote:
Henrik Gemal – http://gemal.dk/ – has his comments set up to automatically insert the commenter’s url’s favicon. Dunno how, but I like that solution better.
Richard@Home wrote:
wooo – Gravatars – I love ‘em.
They seem to be popping on on blogs like mushrooms after the rain too.
Simon Jessey wrote:
I first stumbled across Gravatars on Erik Sagen’s blog – http://www.kartooner.com – he seems to have had it for quite a while. It is indeed a cool idea, but I think it would look a bit weird on my own blog.
Julian wrote:
Just to let you see my Gravatar…
ginny wrote:
Oh, goodie, something new to play with later – the image I’d want to use is stashed in a file on my home computer. And then there’s an issue with speed on my comments. Must discuss with my in-house geek tonight.
Dustin Diaz wrote:
This reminds me much of the favicon pull for when folks put in a website URL, it chases down their favicon.ico file (if they have one) and displays it next to their name.
But this is cool too :)
matsimpsk wrote:
Oooh, fab :) Just having a play to see if my gravatar works…
patrick h. lauke wrote:
yes, it’s a cute idea…but i too wonder about how feasible it will be to maintain once everybody starts using them…
Cody Lindley wrote:
I agree, gravatars are very likable. I am however concerned that the use of such a system will add to a pages download time.
Rich wrote:
Cody, it quite obviously will add to a page’s download time as we are introducing more images to the page. However, with a decently coded page the perceived download time should remain the same, as the text on the page will be rendered before the images are downloaded.
Jonathan M. Hollin wrote:
That’s uncanny… I added Gravatars to my blog yesterday after reading about them in the sideblog over at http://www.individualism.ro/..
I agree that idea of a centralised avatar server is a great one and I’m looking forward to more widespread Gravatar adoption.
As for the scalability of the system, we’ll just have to see how it goes. Let’s keep our fingers crossed eh?
Mark wrote:
Gravatar test – yay!
Si wrote:
To put it bluntly, gravatars are the badger’s nadgers. Thanks for letting me know aboot them :) They’re nice ‘n’ easy to implement too, but my n00b CSS skillz let me down in trying to get it looking right. Oh well, it’ll have to do. One thing though, the tag outputs ampersands in the standard non amp; format, so it screws up my XHTML validation. Pff.
Ottawa wrote:
Rich: That website is the best thing I have seen in a while. Those images are pure classic. I had the biggest laughter attack. It’s genious!
And there is lots of material for those old “ripped” website designs. I know there are too many of them today, but I haven’t done my version yet :)
Aleksandar wrote:
This thing is really getting a momentum. :)
John Oxton wrote:
@si I asked Tom about that ampersand issue and you can just add it to the tag e.g. size&=38, seems to work well.
I have a few ‘glitches’ to sort, particularly as I want a default icon if none are present. On the whole though I am very pleased with it :)
Si wrote:
Thanks for the tip John. Unfortunately, that seems to disable the alternative icon, leaving a blank space (unless I’m missing something really obvious). But hey, it reduces the validation errors… Sorry to nitpick so much – I’m trying to make up for poor site design :)
Small Paul wrote:
Regarding Patrick’s comment below, people were saying that back in July when these first appeared. Seven million images later, it’s still going very strong – I was registered and rated within about 20 minutes last night.
I agree that it will be very interesting to see how far it scales, and what measures can be used if things get overwhelming, but I wouldn’t write it off just yet :)
Tom Werner wrote:
I don’t think I’ll have to worry about gravatar growth becoming overwhelming any time soon. I think the most gravatars I’ve had to rate in a single day is about 30, and really, it doesn’t take long. Since the images are so small, they can be served quite rapidly by my server, and use surprisingly little bandwidth (I have a terabyte a month, so it’ll take a while before I have to think about surpassing my limit). I swear I’ll fix the ampersand issue soon. But really, if you lose sleep over unescaped ampersands in URLs, you need to relax, sit back, and enjoy a cold one!
Si wrote:
Lol, good point. I really gotta let that go. It’s an excellent service, and I’m glad it’s out there. Thanks buddy.
P.S. Sorry Rich for cluttering your blog with comments about ampersands.
Omar Shabbir wrote:
I think these Gravatars are going to take off like hot cakes. I just can’t stop laughing everytime I see your gravatar Richard :)
Chris wrote:
I wrote a caching script in PHP for my site to display Gravatars. It only checks a Gravatar once in a 24 hour period, otherwise it just grabs a local copy. It’s not perfect (I’m still tweaking it), but it keeps bandwidth usage down for both sites: I can use a default image without gravatar.com requesting it from my site (gravatar.com can’t fetch images protected from hotlinking, btw) and only a few requests are made per day to gravatar.com. My cacher doesn’t get filtered by “off site image” blockers either, since the URL is local.
I gotta say, though, Gravatars are a much nicer way of encouraging people to leave a legitimate email address than simply because its “required”.
Scott Johnson wrote:
These gravatars are certainly nice. Mine, however, needs work.
Simon Zimmermann wrote:
I just uploaded my own Gravatar. So I’m posting this to take alook at my little avatar.
Rich wrote:
Gah. It’s happened sooner that I thought. They’ll be back soon, I hope.