I had the idea for a Wordpress plugin replacing the avatar systems of gravatar and MyBlogLog with a microformat based one a while back.

The principle is simple. If you comment somewhere and you leave behind a URL (be it a blog one or an OpenID) and we can follow that URL and find a representative hCard with associated picture for you, it means we can present that picture as your avatar.

It works just as well as most avatar standards out there, it’s distributed and built on top of a proven microformat and gives people a benefit for publishing an hCard on their blog or elsewhere.

Development

Writing that plugin didn’t prove to be too difficult. Integrating Drew McLellan’s hKit library into Wordpress was a bit harder due to my limited experience with PHP and its bizarre quirks.

That hurdle passed I have been using the plugin on my own blog and Cristiano is using it as well. We’ve only had problems running it on this weblog most probably because something on the Solaris installation we are running is interfering (I have no clue what). You can test the plugin yourself on this test weblog.

There are some ideas in here which are similar to those of DiSo in their wishlist for a wp-openid-avatars plugin.

Release

After having spent some due dilligence testing and refining this plugin, I think it’s ready to be released and tested by a larger group of people. The plugin will not do much without you editing your theme as well and making a decision about the presentation of the avatar images.

Alternatively if gravatar() is not defined yet, it will define itself as the gravatar function as well. So a theme which relies on gravatar can expect this plugin to support it.

Get a zip with the plugin in it here, or you can checkout my repository:
hg clone static-http://alper.nl/hg/havatar/

Feedback, suggestions and patches welcome. Caching and resizing are issues that have to be solved in the future.

I found a plugin called identikit which covers a lot of the same ground but is mostly in French. hAvatar is a simple and pure microformats based approach.

Originally posted on the “Cristiano on Tech/Life” blog

Obviously I didn’t get a contract with my brand new iPhone, simply because I don’t have the budget to spend £35 a month on a contract. Maybe in the future I will buy a contract anyway, but for now I am basically stuck with my expensive Dutch contract. In other words: I had to hack my iPhone. With doing this I ran into some issues, which I will try to highlight in the following article, giving some reference for all you other people that are thinking of buying a UK iPhone.

Defining “UK iPhone”

Let’s start by quickly explaining what I mean with the “UK iPhone”. This is kind of important as there are different iPhones out there. With the UK iPhone I mean the iPhone that is currently (January 1st, 2008) sold in the UK that ships with the 1.1.2 firmware (see here to learn how to check firmware you have). iPhones shipped with this firmware Out Of the Box (commonly called OOB or OTB) ship with a new bootloader/baseband. This new bootloader has some repercussions that I will get to later.

Everything I will tell in this article might also hold for the US, German, or French 1.1.2 OOB phones, but I don’t know for sure because I don’t have these phones.

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