Get yourself an avatar – if you want

13 September 2007 Rob Buckley TMINE 6 Comments

The keenly observant, frequent visitor here will notice I’ve been doing a little redecorating of late. This has been greeted with an almost universal non-reaction, with just a few dissenting voices of opprobrium. Not bad, I reckon. I probably won’t be doing much more re-decorating, since MT4 seems a bit of a bastard to upgrade to, so things should stabilise as they are for a while, at least.

Biggest change for yous guys as part of the gradual Vox-ification of the site is you can now have ‘avatars’ by your comments – that’s piccies of yourself. You may recognise the idea from Blogger, if you use Blogger or visit Blogger sites, that is.

Initially, I tried out Gravatars, for the general reasons that

  1. they’re global – you can use them on any gravatar-enabled site
  2. they’re easy for me to implement, since nice people have already written Gravatar plug-ins for Movable Type.

However, they’re slow little bastards, these Gravatars, and no one seems to want to use them, since all you get out of them is a piccie.

So I’ve now made the switch to MyBlogLog avatars. MyBlogLog is owned by Yahoo! so

  1. is practically instantaneous, since Yahoo! has more servers than most countries
  2. offers you lots of other things, too, if you own a blog, such as visitor tracking, a widget that shows visitors who’s been reading the blog and a display of your blog’s most popular links.

Marvellous, hey? All you have to do is sign up for a MyBlogLog account, upload a pic and stake out your blog, then use the URL of your blog here. All very simple really.

‘Course, it was a pain in the bottie for me, since I had to write two plug-ins, one in PHP, one in Perl, to get the bloody thing to work. But I think it’s worth it.

Author

  • Rob Buckley

    I’m Rob Buckley, a journalist who writes for UK media magazines that most people have never heard of although you might have heard me on the podcast Lockdown Land or Radio 5 Live’s Saturday Edition or Afternoon Edition. I’ve edited Dreamwatch, Sprocket and Cambridge Film Festival Daily; been technical editor for TV producers magazine Televisual; reviewed films for the short-lived newspaper Cambridge Insider; written features for the even shorter-lived newspaper Soho Independent; and was regularly sarcastic about television on the blink-and-you-missed-it “web site for urban hedonists” The Tribe. Since going freelance, I've contributed to the likes of Broadcast, Total Content + Media, Action TV, Off The Telly, Action Network, TV Scoop and The Custard TV.

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