Tag: avatars

Replied to One Avatar To Rule Them All by Terence EdenTerence Eden (shkspr.mobi)
Someone took a nice photo of me recently. I'd like to use it as my avatar photo everywhere to present a consistent image. This is not easy to do. I've had to manually change it on a dozen different Slacks, a bunch of social networks, a few forums, all my email accounts, and I'm still not done. I jus...
Gravatar has some not-so secure issues relating to privacy that allow reverse lookups which isn’t good and could potentially leak information people don’t necessarily want to release.

My favorite solution to this problem and a few related others (like updating my bio and where you can find me on social media) is the meta data route using something like Microformats. Since I provide an h-card on my website’s homepage, it should be relatively easy for any service to take my URL as my identity (rather than one of my thousands of email addresses) parse my page and find my name, photo, bio, etc. and display them.

Nearly every social silo on the planet wants all of these details, so why should I need to incessantly have to input them manually much less keep them up to date? And I’ve yet to see a social service in the wild that hasn’t asked for my URL, so it’s obviously pretty universal.

Jeremy Keith‘s Huffduffer is a great example of something that already uses this data nicely. It doesn’t pull in my photo (though I think at one time he did have a set up that would poll Flickr avatars?) or my bio, but the “Elsewhere” section of my Huffduffer account lists where you can find me on dozens of social media accounts as well as my own websites. Huffduffer can do this because I gave it my domain name and the service parses my page looking for the rel="me" tags on my homepage. It could easily pull in my other provided data.

Incidentally Kevin Marks has also proposed a distributed verification system (remember the problem that Twitter had of attempting this?) that uses the rel="me" idea.

I’ll note that my own website will parse yours to pull in the author name, URL, and avatar to display a reply context for this response on my website! So hooray for microformats! (Though I’ll note that I did modify them a tad for my own idiosyncrasies.) My site does this with David Shanske‘s excellent Post Kinds plugin uses Parse This, which parses for microformats, JSON-LD, and then, if nothing is found it falls back to Open Graph Protocol. He’s been extending it lately to cover a handful of the bigger snowflake services like YouTube, IMDb, etc. to cover some additional edge cases that don’t have good mark up. Incidentally Aaron Parecki has a version of something like this called X-ray, which he uses for various things including microsub readers, not to mention the variety of other parsers available.

I’m sure there may be other versions of this in the wild, but it would be cool to see more social services provide functionality like this.

❤️ vboykis tweeted I can forgive Twitter for stuff like,,,destroying the free world and inciting cancel culture

Liked a tweet by Vicki Boykis on TwitterVicki Boykis on Twitter (Twitter)
Vicki, I’m sure you mentioned it purely for your awesome and inimitable snark and you’re obviously otherwise aware… but for everyone else who’s suffering:

Why not keep your avatar on a website you own and control? If it’s at a permalink you control, you can even replace the photo and those who hotlink/transclude it will allow you to update it automatically over time. As an example, I keep one of me at https://www.boffosocko.com/logo.jpg. Having a permalink to my own avatar was the only reason I got a website, and now look what I’ve gotten myself into…

If I recall correctly, when you delete or replace those Twitter avatars, the old links go dead and they generate a new link anyway.

I was reading a post by Greg McVerry when I happened upon the credit for his featured photo. At first I had thought it was a stock photo, and when I realized it was from a IndieWebCamp, I looked closer and noticed that Aaron Parecki’s website was featured on the photo in the cell phone. I looked a bit closer and thought “someone has doctored his avatar as it’s tilted in the photo.” Then, knowing Aaron, I thought I had better check on my cell phone. 

It turns out if you visit his site on a cell phone, his avatar rotates with the phone!

The whimsy of this just brightens my day.

Reply to Aaron Davis about images in h-cards

Replied to a post by Aaron DavisAaron Davis (collect.readwriterespond.com)
@chrisaldrich did you document anywhere how to change the default image associated with posts? At the moment it is using my profile pic, which does not work. Also on: Twitter
Associated how? In the webmentions you send? Typically the receiving site will parse your page to find the h-card and pull out the u-photo for it, so depending on your theme or a custom marked up h-card, that will dictate the photo that shows up.

I have been noticing some issues recently with a lot of photos not showing up in webmentions I receive. Typically they’re for WordPress or micro.blog sites which may mean issues for Gravatar-based images.

If you want to fix them manually, a recent update allows this.