Smashing Magazine released a new plugin last week which shows a commenters Twitter avatar in the comment area. There are still a lot of blog commenters who haven’t signed up with Gravatar many of these people may use Twitter so in effect, this plugin reduces the number of ‘default avatars’ showing in your comment area.
The plugin features :
- Loads user’s avatar by matching the email address to the user’s Twitter email address.
- If user doesn’t have a Twitter account, it first tries to load user’s gravatar. If user doesn’t have a gravatar, it loads a default image. This is an optional setting.
- You can set a 2-pixel border to the images (you choose the color).
- You can choose the size: we suggest 24, 48 or 72 pixels.
- You can set an image other than the default one to load if a user doesn’t have a Twitter account or a gravatar.
- It builds a valid image for you (with alt and title attributes, etc.) based on user details.
- Allows you to add a class to the image, so you can style it later.
Because this plugin has to make a call to the Twitter API, it may slow down your post pages slightly. Therefore, if your blog gets a lot of comments, low bandwidth users may seem a big increase in the loading time of the page. Though I still recommend testing it out to see f there is any noticeable slowdown.
So looks like it needs to cache the results like the gravatar plugin I've stumbled a while ago. Anyway, thanks for noticing.
That's a pretty sweet plug-in. I know it drives me crazy that I have all these default images on my blog comments and I know half these people have a twitter account. Gonna add this plug-in ad see if I notice an increased in images.
Thanks
What a great plug-in. I'm in the process of creating my wordpress site and this will be useful. Thanks.
I have a free wordpress site and I changing it to use a domain and I will certainly be using the plugin. Thanks for your work.
it needs to cache the results like the gravatar plugin I've stumbled a while ago.
Anyway, thanks for noticing.