The avatar fun
I’ve had a Gravatar account for some time now but there’s a problem with it - I don’t always want to leave the same email on all blogs. There’s another problem with the service - it’s offline currently, not accepting new users. Another problem and probably one of the reasons the service went down is also the centralized hosting of images.
For the reasons above I think Pavatar is a better solution. The idea is to retrieve the avatar image from the URL, not the email. You have a few options to provide a Pavatar link (http header, link in the html or simply /pavatar.png). The image is always downloaded from your site which might be a partybreaker if you’re a heavy commenter but better since you control the image at all time.
Today I stumbled upon MonsterID as a fallback for Gravatars. I loved it. I had to do something with it. I downloaded the script written by Andreas Gohr, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and changed it a bit. Well actually a lot. I added local caching and the possibility of adding other templates - I work at an interactive agency so I think I’ll be able to find a few characterbuilding image sets lying around.
The MonsterID service is here for anybody to use. It’s probably going to be as popular as the Pingerator.
January 25th, 2007
by bohwaz
If you’re interested I got my self monster id set used on my blog: http://blogs.kd2.org/bohwaz/?2007/01/25/154-monster-id
If you want I can send you png files if you want to make a template from it for your service.
February 3rd, 2007
by menezes
Now i got monster id!