The Chris O Show

I wanted to add Avatars to my new project whatiwantforxmas.com but it felt like too much hard work. So, I took a leaf out of githubs book and used Gravatars.

Gravatars are an already pre-packaged avatar system, all bright and shiny and ready to be added to your application.

It’s ridiculously easy to put in your app!

I use Scott Woods nice little Gravatar plugin – you can install it in your Rails app thusly:

script/plugin install svn://rubyforge.org/var/svn/gravatarplugin/plugins/gravatar

Here’s how you use it, bung this into your view (where user is an object that has an email attribute):

gravatar_for(user)

And BOO YA – you’ve got an instant gravatar image on your page!

You could also call by passing in an email address (but it’s not so sexy):

gravatar(user.email)
gravatar("jim@banana.com")

You can even set which size you want! (As in this case 50px x 50px)

gravatar(user.email, :size => 50)

“But wait! What if the user doesn’t HAVE a Gravatar?!” Well, then a default image is used instead. Typically something nasty like this:

But dry your eyes, all is not lost. You can set your own default Gravatar! When you call the Gravatar method just pass in a :default param pointing to the default image you want to use.

gravatar_for(user, :size => 50, :default => "http://www.whatiwantforxmas.com/images/avatars/santa/santa-50.png")

I wasn’t into the scaling of the default images though, so I wrote this little snippet of code so that you can have a separate default image for each Gravatar size you want. This ensures that I only use Gravatars that are 25, 50 or 70px (the sizes that I have default images for).

Copy this code into a file in your lib folder, and don’t forget to ‘require’ it in an initializer.

module GravatarHelper
  module PublicMethods

    AVATAR_SIZES = [25, 50, 70]

    def gravatar_for_with_default(object, options={})
      options[:size] ||= 25      
      options.merge!(:default => "http://www.whatiwantforxmas.com/images/avatars/santa/santa-#{options[:size]}.png")      
      # sizes are 25, 50 and 70
      raise RuntimeError, "Incorrect size for Avatar" unless AVATAR_SIZES.index(options[:size])    
      gravatar_for_without_default(object, options)
    end
    alias_method_chain :gravatar_for, :default
  end
end

And then I just need to call it like this:

gravatar_for(user, :size => 50) # This will use my default avatar

PS Yeah, I know I know – my blog doesn’t use Gravatars yet…