schwern writes "Graham added Gravatars to author pages on search! Have a look!
Because of performance issues with gravatar.com, they're cached and the cache is still being populated. If yours isn't there, just give it a bit of time.
Here's the FAQ entry I've proposed.
Where do the author's pictures come from and how do I set mine?
They come from the Gravatar associated with that author's cpan.org email address. To set yours, simply sign up with gravatar using your cpan.org address. We cache the gravatars so give it a day or so to catch up."
Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
hex on 2007-09-11T09:49:30
See also this related thread.Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
b10m on 2007-09-11T10:02:56
You even have to pay $10/year for adding another email address with the image you already had. I'll pass on this one too and wait for the OpenID implementation;-) Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
jk2addict on 2007-09-11T12:38:26
NO thanks indeed. Why not just let users upload a gravater.jpg to their author directory?Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
Aristotle on 2007-09-11T16:24:05
That was my thought also, but note that CPAN and search.cpan.org are not the same thing. How would the CPAN mirrors feel about carrying those photos? I guess it will be so little data in total that it doesn’t matter, but…
Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
b10m on 2007-09-11T19:56:10
If the problem is the space, I'm willing to host it and invite the Perl Hackers out there to write something similar to gravatar;-) Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
Aristotle on 2007-09-11T20:36:52
The problem is very unlikely to be space. search.cpan.org almost certainly has more than enough. The problem is just that the CPAN mirrors consented to a particular kind of use of their service, as a precondition to providing it, and I wouldn’t want to give them valid reason to object for not being consulted.
I don’t know if it’s actually a problem. Someone who knows more about the CPAN politics will have to tell me.
CPAN mirrors wouldn't care.
schwern on 2007-09-12T00:18:29
My original idea was to have authors upload face.jpg and icon.jpg files. It's unlikely to be a real issue, there's all sorts of crap on CPAN that's not a module and nobody really cares, and this is actually useful. As long as its freely redistributable and has something to do with Perl.
Even if every single author uploaded a picture and an icon it would be about 8 megs (an 80x80 full color jpg is about 2k and there's about 2000 authors), maybe more depending on your block size. Peanuts. CPAN is currently well over 1 gig. Even minicpan is pushing 700 megs.
Re:CPAN mirrors wouldn't care.
Aristotle on 2007-09-12T05:34:46
As I said, it’s just about whether the mirrors will object to this use of their resources. But I didn’t do the math myself, so yeah – I guess we’re talking about such minuscule amounts of data that no one will possibly bother to complain. We have probably blown more bandwidth by reloading this use.Perl thread than the images are likely to consume for a good amount of time.
Btw, if we do use these files, it would be nice if their names were added to the exception list of files that can be re-uploaded.
Re:Do you work for Gravatar?
schwern on 2007-09-11T22:04:25
Why are we using a commercial service?
Because...
1) It was easy to implement.
Which is very important as I wanted to have Graham and Andreas do as little work as possible in order to have the best chance them to agree to it. I've been kicking around this idea for a long time and Gravatar solved a whole lot of problems all at once. Rather than wibble another year we JFDI'd. Remember "rough consensus and running code"? That.
Now we have something working and can play with and improve rather than the idea just rotting in my brain.
2) At the level we need, it's free beer.
They want $10 to have multiple email addresses on a single account, so just make one account for your CPAN address and one for your regular address. Slightly inconvenient, but you gets what you don't pay for. *shrug* I have no problem using free beer services if they get the job done.
3) It's a service with a documented protocol.
I'm tired with how so much of CPAN is difficult to access as an API or undocumented. Even just the simple act of "what modules were written by this author" is non-trivial to get programmatically. Gravatars allow *anyone* to look up an author's picture based on their PAUSE ID. Maybe rt.cpan.org will start using it.
4) It plays well with others.
And by "others" I mean "not Perl people". I'm tired of Perl coming up with Yet Another Custom Service that doesn't talk to anything else out there. This is part of the reason we're invisible outside our bubble, we don't play well with others. And maybe some CPAN devs will start playing with Gravatars outside of CPAN and increase our visibility just a little bit more and reverse the "Perl is dead" trend.
I've now got Thunderbird setup to display gravatars. If it was a custom CPAN thing that would not be possible.
5) It's so simple, we can leave if we need to.
The Gravatar protocol is so trivial that if we needed to take our things and go home I could write up a basic server in about an hour. Gravatar::URL even already has the provision to change servers.
6) Everything's cached.
Graham caches all the pictures locally so if gravatar goes tits up we still have them all.
Re:Only on one page?
schwern on 2007-09-11T21:59:55
Yeah, that's my feeling as well. I suggested it to Graham. Let him know you feel the same.Re:Only on one page?
jrockway on 2007-09-11T23:07:23
Can we just have the source for search.cpan, please? I'm tired of all changes having to go through one person, AND I'm tired of reimplementing all the good stuff just to get to the same place search.cpan is now.Re:Only on one page?
hex on 2007-09-12T10:13:03
Although Graham has been wonderfully responsive and helpful of late, I have to second this opinion.Re:Only on one page?
hex on 2007-09-12T12:09:01
Seeing that this has now been implemented, frankly I think it looks wrong. I don't *want* to see people's faces in my documentation, thanks. If it absolutely has to be done, a scaled-down 16x16 version on the left of the author's name at the top of the page would be a more appropriate place for it.Re:Only on one page?
schwern on 2007-09-13T22:30:54
If a 40x40 image on a web page really bothers you, you're free to block it. That's the great thing about the web. If you haven't yet figured out how to block images in a web browser, here ya go! That will make your entire browsing experience much more enjoyable.Re:Only on one page?
Aristotle on 2007-09-14T00:03:44
Did you even read his complaint? He doesn’t want his own pic to show up on his POD pages when other people look at them. What is the point of telling him how he can block all Gravatars everywhere on the web in his own browser?
Which is, btw, the reason I’m not even interested in uploading a Gravatar at the time being. Having it on the author page, great; on the POD pages? Not so much.
