Get Gravatar is meant to be used with a text input. As the text changes in the input, it pings the Gravatar service to fetch the user’s avatar. Due to Gravatar’s restrictions, Gravatars must be retrieved with an MD5 hash of the user’s email. Since Javascript doesn’t have a built-in way to fetch an MD5 hash, this plugin has a PHP counterpart.

Obviously there are more creative uses for this, but either way it’s a nifty script.

Now, MyBlogLog is an interesting concept, but it has some issues, and I’m sure a lot of you avoid it for the same reasons I do.

Recently, I came up with something a bit more interesting…

Okay, obviously you like to recieve comments on your blog postings, and it’s nice to offer a small reward to people who frequently contribute to the discussions. Thus, many of us have “Top Commentators” sections on our blogs, which generally show frequent commenters’ names and link to their websites.

After reading Blog Herald’s post on MyBlogLog (see above link), I thought “Why not have a recent/top commentators section on a blog that displays Gravatars linked to the commentators’ uls instead of just names?” (From my Twitter.)

Obviously this is a plugin waiting to happen, but I’m too lazy to throw one together yet. If anyone wants to take my idea and build something, feel free to do so. (If you do build a plugin, I’d like an email so I can try it out myself…)

And here’s the plugin: Gravatar Top Commenters.

It’s fairly easy to add Gravatar support to your site, and even easier to get your own Gravatar. For instructions on adding support to your site, read the documentation. You can use PHP, Perl, Coldfusion, or any language really. Plus, if you’re lazy, there are plugins available for major platforms such as WordPress.

Why should you add Gravatars next to your blog comments?

• It makes it easier to recognize commentators…including you. Who cares about comment highlighting when you can just have a personal image next to your comments.
• You’re giving your readers the ability to personalize their comments a little more.
• Tons of people have Gravatars. If you allow theirs to show-up on your blog, they may comment more frequently.

Here’s how it works:

• You register and set-up your Gravatar.
• You go about your business online as usual.
• If you comment on a Gravatar-equipped blog using one of the email addresses you added to your Gravatar acccount, your avatar will be automagically added next to your comment.

Is that cool, or what? Now that Automattic owns Gravatar, the service is getting even better. Features that previously required payment are now freely available to everyone. Now anyone can have “multiple e-mail addresses and more than 2 uploaded avatars to choose from.”