04 Nov 2009

Reverse Gravatar Functionality

First off: If you don’t know what a Gravatar is, watch this video:

Here’s a nice feature I didn’t know Gravatar had: The url of your avatar image is static. It’s not even a ‘feature’ as such, but what it does mean is that when using websites/forums that don’t support Gravatar you can give them this url and your avatar should update along with the cached version on the Gravatar server. Neat, eh?

To take advantage of this functionality, you need the direct link to your image. When managing your Gravatar account, you’ll see the link to the image in the lower right:

Another little gem: Gravatar converts your image into several different formats for you. The image I uploaded was a png, but the forum I wanted to use it on would only take jpgs. On a hunch I tried just changing the extension on the url. It worked! Gif is also supported like this, and for all I know there may be more. Try it! Just make sure to let me know if you find any more cool stuff there, ok?

Thanks for reading! If you like my writing, you may be interested in my book: Healthy Webhook Consumption with Rails

David at 21:12