What is Gravatar?
Gravatar was developed by Automattic, who are best known for WordPress, and stands for a Globally Recognised Avatar.
The Gravatar website gives the following description.
Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
What is GetGravatar?
Get Gravatar
We think Gravatar is a fantastic idea but at the moment there are only a few websites or blogs that support it. So, we’ve created a service called GetGravatar that will make it easier for you to use your Gravatar on some of the web’s most popular services and web sites. GetGravatar allows you to update your profile image or avatar with your Gravatar on web sites or services that don’t natively support it at the moment.
What services does GetGravatar support?
We’ve started by adding support for Twitter since it’s one of the most popular services available at the moment and they have an easy to use set of APIs that made it relatively easy for us to use GetGravatar to update your Twitter profile image.
What do we have planned for GetGravatar?
We’ve only just added support for Twitter and are presently gathering user feedback using UserVoice. If you have any ideas we’d love to hear them.
You can give us feedback by going to the GetGravatar UserVoice forum.
How was it built?
We used building GetGravatar as an opportunity to try out a number of technologies. GetGravatar is a web application built using the Microsoft ASP.NET MVC framework and it runs on the Microsoft Windows Azure cloud service. We use Twitter’s API to update a Twitter user’s profile image, but we do this using a third party library called tweet#.
We like to do things correctly at Independent Software Solutions so we approached developing GetGravatar using a technique called TDD (Test Driven Development) so we also used a unit testing framework called MBUnit to test our code and Castle Windsor for dependency injection to ensure it was easy to test things.