Pavatar is a service much like Gravatar which allows you to provide a personal avatar of yourself that can be used on sites that support the service. Unlike Gravitar which hosts your picture for you, Pavatar relies on your personal picture being hosted on your webspace. There are plugins available for most blogging platforms as well as libraries that you can use to incorporate pavitars into your own applications. It’s funny how almost everybody is becoming a web publisher nowadays, so that you have entire de facto standards and ecosystems created by people who want to improve elements of the entire experience for everyone.
interesting websites
New Year – New Design
To start the new year off on a fresh start, I have finally redesigned DMM. I was pretty happy with the last design, but felt it was time to renew the look. The new design is a bit more “blog-like” but my main goal was to widen the content area so that I can present screencasts in the content are more easily. Screencasting is regular feature that I hope to post regularly this year. I also have some ideas for the left sidebar that you should see appear within the next week or so. I am also going to bring back the rotating banner image (a popular item in the design before the last).
I hastily updated the site before Christmas with the hopes of cleaning it up over the holidays. Well we got pretty busy and the time to clean it up didn’t happen. So I know that the overall design is still not quite done. I need to spend a bit more time on validatation (a necessary evil) and there are some issues with the footer on IE6 that need to be fixed.
One of my New Year’s resolutions is to become active in the open source community. Seeing as WordPress my most used open source application, it seems only logical that I participate in their community. So starting now, this blog is being powered by the WP2.1 nightly builds. I know that running a production site on unstable code is a little risky, but I’m brave and prepared to submit great bug reports. I actually haven’t found any problems yet, but that’s not to say I won’t come across any in the near future. On the topic of WP2.1, I am really enjoying the new features added to the admin backend. Features like post auto-saving and the reorganization of comment management, make this blogging tool a pleasure to use!