Alex Mills who is also known as Viper007Bond has discovered that Battlelog, EA’s game management site for Battlefield 3 has chosen to use Gravatar to power their profile images. This is great news for Gravatar as Battlefield 3 is going to be the hottest game being played for quite some time. I hope this type of adoption occurs elsewhere for Gravatar so it can one day live up to it’s name of being globally recognized avatars. By the way, I’ve purchased Battlefield 3 and am anxiously awaiting my turn to play the beta as well as the full release on October 25th. If you’ll be playing the PC version of the game, please add this username to your friends list, DeathXpress. Feel free to tell me your account name in the comments so I can add you to my list. ∞
Gravatar Support In Thunderbird Thanks To Extension
Thanks to an extension for Thunderbird called Display Contact Photo, you can now view Gravatars within emails in Thunderbird. The Gravatar blog has a good explanation on how to setup and install the extension. I’ve installed the extension as Thunderbird is my email client of choice. So don’t be surprised to see a beer mug accompanying replies from me although I’m not sure yet if both parties need to be running the extension to see the images.
A Little Closer To Being Global
Gravatar has yet to live up to the G (Global) in its name but it’s slowly getting there. Beau Lebens has published a few more developer resources that have been submitted to the Gravatar site including a Gravatar extension to the Yii framework, extension to the TYPO 3 CMS, and a Django custom tag.
I remember in 2009 when I asked why Gravatar was not mainstream, despite the service existing for a number of years now. It’s not as if Gravatar needs to completely replace avatar systems. It just needs to be one of the choices when configuring your avatar. I was very surprised to find out that VBulletin does not have built in support for Gravatar nor is there an extension to add support for it. I’d think that there is a benefit to using Gravatars on a forum instead of uploaded custom avatars because the images are loaded from a third party service and that means less space in the database being used by all of the uploaded avatar images.
Since the avatar system still does not have global support just yet, I was happy to read the news regarding Gravatar Profiles. This definitely gives Gravatars more oomph. I wonder if support will be added to show the most recent blog posts or other things on the Gravatar profile.
Is Gravatar Slowing You Down?
We already know that Gravatar is a third party service and that support for it is built into WordPress. But, is that dependence on Gravatar slowing your site down? SEOMofo takes a hard look at the performance hit that Gravatar can cause on a WordPress powered website with various configurations in place such as whether they are enabled or disabled, custom default Gravatar, etc. It’s not surprising that a page load increases as the number of comments with unique Gravatar hash urls also increases. The numbers presented in the post may seem low but when taking a look at the big picture, there are performance gains to be had. For example, hosting the default Gravatar image on your own web server instead of using the one on Gravatars server is a big help.
Read through their performance tests to see the hard numbers and then tell me whether or not it’s worth the effort.
WPWeekly Episode 69 – Grava what
In this episode, David Peralty and a few others join me to talk about the news of the week. Most of the news stories deal with Automattic owned services such as IntenseDebate and Polldaddy rather than WordPress. One of the discussion points focused on why Gravatar has not yet made it mainstream. While the audio quality is not so great in this episode, I hope you’ll be able to listen through it for this particular conversation.
Ad Copy:
This episode of WordPress Weekly is sponsored by WebDevStudios.com. WebDevStudios would like to announce the launch of their new project, WPClassroom.com! WPClassroom.com is dedicated to providing high quality professional WordPress training using the most powerful online training software powered by Cisco WebEx. Reserve your seat today at WPClassroom.com! By the way, use the coupon code wptavern when sigining up and that will take off $5.00 on the first class on September 9th.
Stories Discussed:
Gravatar.com Gets A Facelift
Why isn’t Gravatar Main Stream Yet?
Open Source CMS Awards
IntenseDebate Future Features
WP E Commerce Integration With IntenseDebate
PollDaddy Style Editor
WordPress Tavern Listener Poll:
Last weeks poll question was: Do you think the Codex is the future of documentation for WordPress?
Out of a total of 45 votes, 23 of you said Yes, 20 of you said No while 2 of you wanted to know what is a Codex.
This Weeks Poll Question Is: Have You Enjoyed Your Stay At The Tavern So Far?
Picks Of The Week:
Jeff – IRCLogs.wordpress.org – Enables you to see the log file for the bbPress, BuddyPress development, WordPress development, WordPress, and WPMU IRC channels. The log file page also provides a nifty bar of options at the top where you can easily switch channel logs, view log files from the past few months, or perform a search. So if you can’t catch those WordPress developer chats on Thursdays, this is the place to go to read the log file of the meeting.
David – Widget Context Plugin – Kaspars – http://konstruktors.com/blog/
Last Weeks WordPress Trivia Question:
What is the name of the new part time employee Automattic recently hired? (by the way, John is full time)
WordPress Trivia Answer:
John Godley
This Weeks Trivia Question
In a recent interview, Matt was asked if he were to start another project, along the same lines as WordPress but had nothing to do with blogging, what would it be?
Announcements:
On Thursday August 27th at 2PM Eastern Daylight Time, we’ll be interviewing Adii of WooThemes. The special date and time is due to Adiis geographic location.
WPWeekly Meta:
Next Episode: Friday August 28th, 2009 8P.M. EST
Subscribe To WPWeekly Via Itunes: Click here to subscribe
Length Of Episode: 51 Minutes
Download The Show: WordPressWeeklyEpisode69.mp3
Listen To Episode #69:
Gravatar.com Gets A New Look
Thanks to Viper007bond on Twitter, I was notified of a new redesign for Gravatar.com. Seems as though most sites under the Automattic umbrella are getting a refresh these days. The new design definitely provides more information than its counterpart along with links to developer resources on the front page. Also, there is a large screencast video produced by Michael Pick which explains what the service is all about.
Gravatar gets a new look
Gravatar is not a complex site so this simple front page sums up the site quite well. What do you think?