Zach’s ugly mug (his face) Zach Leat­herman

Scare Your Visitors with this JavaScript Gravatar Plugin

January 08, 2009

See the Demo

Download the Source Code

Tournology Blog Comment Form

Here’s a use case. An unregistered visitor visits your blog, and decides that your content is so good that it merits a comment! Congratulations, you’ve fooled them! Now you can twply their account details for $1200 on Sitepoint! Just kidding. But generally, when you visit a blog’s commenting section (such as the Tournology Blog shown above), you’ll see a simple form to authenticate you’re not a spammer, generally including (among other things) an e-mail address field.

Tournology Blog Comment Form With Gravatar

Well, since they’re typing their e-mail address, wouldn’t it be cool if we could show them their gravatar right there, inline with the blog comment form? Well, that’s now possible with my new JavaScript Gravatar Plugin! It doesn’t have any server side language dependencies.

Gravatar Signup Page

Hell, gravatar.com could even use this to improve the user experience of registering your e-mail account. Right now it does a full page refresh and doesn’t even show you a preview!

See the Demo

Download the Source Code

Licensing

Licensed under the WTFPL, as highly recommended by Isaac Schleuter (see discussion).

JavaScript Dependencies:

  • Requires jQuery (Feel free to port and post a link!)
  • Requires md5.js

Example Usage:

Easiest form, onblur of email text input field:

$('#emailTextField').blur(function(event) { $(this).after($.gravatar($(this).val())); });

Showing all options, again onblur of email text input field.

$('#email').blur(function(event) { $('body').append($.gravatar($(this).val(), { // integer size: between 1 and 512, default 80 (in pixels) size: 200, // maximum rating (in order of raunchiness, least to most): g (default), pg, r, x rating: 'pg', // url to define a default image (can also be one of: identicon, monsterid, wavatar) image: 'identicon' })); });

Update: This script has been moved to Github.

Zach Leatherman is a builder for the web at Font Awesome and the creator of Build Awesome (née Eleventy/11ty), an award-winning open source website generator. He measures website performance with speedlify and at one point became too fixated on web fonts. He has given 86 talks in nine different countries at events like Beyond Tellerrand, Smashing Conference, Jamstack Conf, CSSConf, and The White House. Learn more about Zach »