Playing with The GIMP and Gravatar

Some blogs, archives for mailing lists, other site and even some application seem to be able to find a matching icon/avatar for the user that posts a message. Blogger, WordPress.com, but also for example Gmane use Gravatar (Gravatar is one of the avatar-services used by Gmane, not the only one.).

Personally I always like to know how the others I am working with look like. This makes is also easier in case one actually meets one other.

Gravatar is actually pretty easy to use, you only need to calculate the MD5-hash from an emailaddress and append that to a URL:

$ echo -n [email protected] | md5sum
9f9a7a129db9c1065c011dba45c3cee9
The emailaddress is a fake one, the md5sum is real though.

Now the URL http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/9f9a7a129db9c1065c011dba45c3cee9 (optionally append .gif, .jpg, ...) can be used to retrieve the avatar:


Of course this only makes sense if you have an icon of yourself. I created my current one, using The GIMP with some help from the following sites:

• Replacing a Background with The GIMP
• Simulating Shallow Depth of Field with The GIMP
• Adding drop shadows to images

There are surely other tutorials that explain the same, but Google put these high in the results and they worked for me.