Gravatar Blog

By downloading the “Display Contact Photo” extension from Thunderbird, you can now view Gravatars, creating a personalized touch to all your email messages:

How to Install

To set this up, first follow the download and installation directions found on the extension page above.

Then, to specifically enable Gravatars, follow these steps:

1. Go to Tools > Add-ons > Extensions. Click “Options.”

2. Open the “Remote photos” tab and click “enable Gravatars.”

3. Go to the “General Settings” tab and in the “Choose a default photo” drop-down menu, select “Gravatar.” Click “OK.”

4. You’re all set. Enjoy!

Since our last update, we’ve spotted a number of implementations of Gravatar around the web that we think are pretty neat. Here are a couple of them:

• MailChimp now supports Gravatar, loading them up as part of the member profile for any subscribers who belong to mailing lists you manage.
• Yoav emailed to let us know about Gravatar.NET, a package for .NET developers who want to make full use of the XML-RPC API to manage their images remotely. He is using his library on Ponderi.com, and has a tutorial about working with the XML-RPC API on his personal site.
• Rapportive is a very cool browser plugin that modifies your GMail screen so that you can see some information about the contacts you’re conversing with. It aggregates data from all over the place, including images and profile data from Gravatar.
• We’ve also heard a few whispers from folks who are playing with the new profile data and how that can be used in other applications as well — more on that in the future!

We really love seeing Gravatar pop up in new and different ways, so if you’ve heard of or seen any others, please let us know in the comments.

Did you know that your profile pages are fully marked up using hCard? hCard is a microformat for programmatically embedding information about people, companies, organizations, and places in HTML and other markup languages. The screenshot below describes some of the main markup involved on a profile page

1. Email address marked up with class=email (only available via JS/client-side parsing due to spam-protection measures)
2. IM accounts marked up using class=url (some values only available via JS/client-side parsing due to spam-protection measures)
3. Phone numbers marked up with class=tel (using type/value subproperties)
4. Verified accounts marked up with class=url and rel=me
5. Name marked up with class=fn
6. Personal Links are marked up with class=url
7. Image (main Gravatar) is marked up using class=photo

hCard on Profile Pages

There’s more profile-data goodness coming soon, so check back here for the latest.

Thanks to an email from the creator, we’ve been made aware of this really neat Gravatar-powered application for Mac users. Picture Finder is a free (but please donate!) application for Mac OSX 10.6 users that allows you to control the images that appear in Address Book on your system (which will also sync to your iPhone if you have one). It looks up all the different possible images for each contact based on any email addresses you have stored against them.

Picture Finder main window

It won’t keep images updated, but it does give you a quick and easy way to select an image for your contacts from one of the generated options, or their selected image if they have a Gravatar account. I enabled the option to “Replace pictures without double checking with me” and then I was able to just go through and double-click the image I wanted for each of my contacts.

We absolutely love seeing Gravatar make its way off the web and onto your desktop, into your cell phone and everywhere else. Do you know of any other cool uses of Gravatars? Let us know in the comments!

Back in March when we announced Gravatar profiles, your profile page remained private so that only you could access it. Now that you’ve had a chance to update your information and make sure that only details you want public are there, let’s open things up. It’s been just over 2 months and more than 300,000 people have updated their details so it’s time to do what we’ve been really excited to do since we first announced profiles:

As of right now, your profile page on Gravatar.com is open to public linking!

People have been emailing us, asking when they could start linking to this new, centralized identity point. The answer is “now.” You can quickly and easily set up a single place that includes to all your contact details, links to other online profiles and websites, plus includes a little information about yourself.

We’re really looking forward to seeing what people do with their profiles, and we’ve made a few additional changes so that they are even more useful:

• Profile pages are completely public, and accessible via nice short links, for example http://gravatar.com/beau (get your link from the bottom of your profile page)
• We’ve improved our support for translations, and are now looking for your help to get the Gravatar website translated into as many languages as possible
• foursquare and TripIt have been added to the list of accounts you can confirm via Gravatar (let us know in the comments if there are specific services you’d like to see supported)
• You’re no longer limited to 140 characters when writing your bio, so go nuts and tell everyone your life story!
• That old profile editor of ours was way too ugly and hard to use, so we’ve made it easier to use and to see what’s going on (and to add more options, such as…)
• Custom Backgrounds! Upload any image or pick any color and set it as the background for your public profile page. Here’s mine with some freshly-cut grass as the background:

As always, if you don’t want any of your information to be public, then please just log into your account and go to “Edit My Profile” to remove those details. People will then only be able to see your Gravatar image, just like before. We’re working on some really cool new things around profiles, and will get them out the door as soon as they’re available!

Developers; get your developer hats on because there are some especially cool things coming for you soon

Gravatar has always been about GLOBALLY Recognized Avatars. The Global part of that came from Gravatar being really simple to implement in almost any environment. Let’s see what we can do to make things global by being available in every language!

Previously, a few very helpful volunteers made sure that the Gravatar website was available in 14 different languages. There are now more strings to translate than ever (469 per language actually!), and so we’ve spent some time trying to make things easier to work with. Our buddies over at WordPress.com are hosting a GlotPress installation for us that will allow you all to contribute to the translation process online, with nothing but a web browser. All you need to do to get started is head over to the Gravatar project, log in using your WordPress.com/Gravatar account and start translating strings!

We’ve imported all previous translations to get things started, and you’ll find some nifty tools in GlotPress, including the ability to use Google Translate for a bit of a head start. Strings are also prioritized according to where they appear within the website (so that we get the most important ones translated first). If you’d like to work on a language that isn’t currently listed, please let us know via an email to support [at] gravatar.com and we’ll get things set up for you.

Once each translation gets near completion, we’ll get it online so that everyone can benefit from seeing the Gravatar.com website in their native language.

We’re really looking forward to making Gravatar even more global than ever with your help!

Have you seen Animoto? No? Go back a few words and click that link. Animoto is awesome. It’s a service that automagically creates a professional-looking video for you based on a bunch of photos (and/or video clips), synchronized to music of your choice. Take a look at some of their sample videos to see what I’m talking about.

I just found out today that Animoto have added Gravatar support, so now when you leave comments on a video over there, you’ll see something like this:

Nice!

CPAN was a pretty early adopter (outside of blogs) of Gravatar, and have been using them for quite a while to put a face to the name of the people who are developing the core modules of the Perl programming language. I just happened to come across this awesome page that I had to share, called The Faces of CPAN. It shows a page containing all of the Gravatars of members who have one. Very cool.

I’d love to see websites do something like this, showing their “community” of commenters via their Gravatars. Maybe I’ll write a quick plugin to do that…

We’re always really happy to see submissions from folks like you that make it easier to implement Gravatar within different programming languages, software packages, frameworks and tools. Recently we’ve received some more, so here’s a list of new implementations (which I’m also adding to the Developer Resources section of the site):

• Vincent Gabriel submitted a Gravatar extension for the Yii Framework,
• Steffen emailed us to tell us about an extension for the TYPO3 CMS,
• We were emailed a Django custom tag,
• Ralf Ebert submitted a new Java library.

Thanks everyone for submitting details and for helping spread Gravatar to become a truly Global avatar. If you know of any other implementations that we’re not aware of, please let us know in the comments!