Fresh Click Media

Web and Software Development

Category Archives: Gravatar

May 31, 2009
by shane
7 Comments

Adobe Flex Gravatar Control

Flex Gravatar Control

I have recently been getting to grips with Adobe Flex for a project that I’ve been working on, and thought a fun little bit of work would be to write a Flex Gravatar Control. I’d done the equivalent for ASP.NET, so why not have another go?

Incidentally, I don’t know whether there’s much call for a Flex Gravatar control – if you’re reading this and find a use for it – great, but I hope that there may be something in this post that helps a budding Flex developer too.

The general idea of component development is to package up a reusable bit of code for use in applications. Since a Gravatar is just an image, it seems natural that the Gravatar component extends (otherwise known as inheriting) the Flex mx.controls.Image class. The benefit of inheritance here is that we get a bunch of functionality for free that we can use as a basis for our control. We’ll be adding our specific Gravatar code so that the image shown is a particular user’s Gravatar. Continue reading →

June 12, 2008
by shane
15 Comments

ASP.NET Gravatar Control Update – Full Source Included

Gravatar ASP.NET Control

With gravatars now becoming ubiquitous in blogs and forums, I have developed an ASP.NET Control that encapsulates their functionality in a simple, reusable component. It’s so easy to use, you can download and be using it on your ASP.NET sites within minutes.

I’ve since had a lot of interest in the source code for the control, and so this post describes how the control works, as well as providing a download containing the control, as well as the full control source and example website that uses the control. Continue reading →

February 22, 2008
by shane
59 Comments

Gravatar ASP.NET Control

I just got myself a freshclickmedia.com Gravatar over at gravatar.com. A Gravatar is a little avatar associated with an email address, and quite a few blogs use them to decorate post comments. Signing up is easy – all you need to do is supply an email address, and image, and give your image a content rating.

The source of the gravatar image tag points to gravatar.com’s image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the email address to prevent email harvesting. A ‘max rating’ parameter prevents the display of unsavoury content.

There are a wide number of blogging gravatar plugins, so I decided to write an ASP.NET custom control to do the job. Here I present the control and its features.
Continue reading →