One of the Geeknews articles recently topped 80+ comments and I figured it would be interesting to turn on Gravatars to see what popped up beside the names. However, most of the posts didn’t have Gravatars associated with their e-mail, so I’d either just turn it back off or end up having to add yet another a plug-in to enable autogenerating an avatar for those folks. I was leaning toward’s Shamus’ Wavatars.

Lucky me, it looks like as of a few months ago, Gravatar has added Wavatar support along with two other avatar generators so no plug-in is required now; how convenient! Thank you Shamus and Gravatar!

BTW, since my theme didn’t have Gravatar support built-in originally, I’ve added the following to my comments.php:

<?php if(!empty($comment -> comment_author_email)) {
$md5 = md5($comment -> comment_author_email);
$size = 32; // size in pixels squared
$default = urlencode(‘wavatar’);
echo “<img src=’http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=$md5&$size&default=$default’ alt=” />”;
}
?>

Before I learned that Wavatar support had been added to the backend at Gravatar.com, $default was “http://geeknews.net/images/no_gravatar.jpg“. As you can see it wasn’t very attractive, so being able to mix it up with something interesting is a nice touch.

For Wavatar support, just append your image source Gravatar URL request with ?d=wavatar (here’s gravatar’s implementation page).

Or, instead of “wavatar” you could pass in “monsterid” or “identicon”.

If you’re not familiar with any of these, here’s some examples, each commenter’s unique avatar is generated either randomly or based on their IP:

Tuesday, GOOG will unveil further advances they’ve made to target ads down to a science, to charge even more per advert.

I for one welcome our new Google overlords.

The Awesome Highlighter is a web service that will open any web page in their own frame and allow you to drag a highlighter marker around the page, marking up anything you want. The Awesome Highlighter service will archive your page and you can link to it so others can see your page of interest with the more interesting or relevant text marked up.

They also have a Firefox add-on.

Here’s a sample screenshot of a marked up Geeknews article:

The top row of pics below represent some of the new favicons from Google. They’ve recently been going through the exploratory process of producing a lightweight and small symbol or letter to represent ‘GOOGLE’ in the browser’s address bar.

It’s kinda-sorta in a way like the ‘g’ favicon for Geeknews… …only mine is better. :p

The bottom collection of pics are favicons that were considered and discarded, who knows you may still see these used in a future GOOG product.

From Information Week: Minnesota town vanishes from Google Street images.

OK, perhaps my title for this post is a little harsh. It appears that the city council for North Oaks, Minnesota saw the Google Maps Street View pics on the net as a violation of the their trespassing ordinance. The city asked Google to take down the photos, Google complied.

I’m impressed.

Google last week filed a motion to dismiss an invasion-of-privacy and trespassing lawsuit brought by a couple in Pennsylvania over Google Maps Street View images of the couple’s house. While Google has removed the images in question, it rejects the couple’s demand for damages, claiming that the couple’s expectation of privacy is too high.