What has been going on in the world of Gravatar

Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Now you can watch Gravatar, the motion picture! Which was put together by the ever helpful Michael Pick. If you’ve ever had trouble explaining exactly what Gravatar.com does to your friends, family, neighbors, long lost friends, and that dude down the street, then this is the screen cast for you!

404 Gravatar Not Found?!

It may not be a groundbreaking feature, but there is some a small new addition to the Gravatar API. You can now specify a default value of 404 to make the image… well… return a 404 not found error if there is no image for the given email address. This probably wont change the life of you website developers out there, but it just might make it easier for you application developers (you know… the people who have to actually compile their code before it works…)

Did You Know?

Today we have TWO “Did you know” tidbits for the price of one.

1. This little tidbit is often a surprise for developers to find out, but you can use https://secure.gravatar.com/ […] to link to an SSL encrypted Gravatar.  This is especially useful when linking using Gravatars from SSL encrypted web pages.

2. You can pre-fill the email address in sign up form for Gravatar.com to make it a little bit easier for your users to know what to do. Just add the email address to the end of the sign up URL like so.

Sightings in the Wild

1. Where.com’s “WHERE wall” web service has been using Gravatars since the word “GO” for displaying user avatars. They had one small hiccup, but we got in contact with the developers (who were super nice and down to earth, by the way) to get the situation rectified.

2. We recently heard that doMelhor (which, I’m told, is the leading Portuguese digg clone) recently enabled Gravatar support for avatar display.

That’s all I have for now but, as always, there is more to come from Gravatar.com

Cheers! DK