Hot on the heels of a post I wrote 4 years ago, wouldn't it be useful to have a well-known URl for user avatar images? When I sign up to a web service, I don't want to faff around uploading an image to use as my avatar. I want that service to look at my email address or social-sign-in and automatically pick up my preferred graphic. Here's how I see it working. A user signs in to a service with the email address username@example.com In a similar way to WebFinger, the service makes a request…
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Given a social media user's username, how do you get a picture of their avatar? I always used avatars.io - but sadly that service has bitten the dust. So I've switched to unavatar. It's dead easy to use. https://unavatar.now.sh/twitter/edent will return @edent's avatar. You can use GitHub, Facebook, Gravatar, Instagram, Telegram, YouTube, SoundCloud, and a couple of other providers. Simple to use, and easy to embed in an <img> element. It's also open source and looks pretty easy to deploy …
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Play with the demo I was lucky enough to go to Number 10 Downing Street for a meeting a few weeks ago. A perfect opportunity for a photo of me by that famous door. Being the vain man that I am, I wanted to set it as my avatar photo. But Twitter and other social networks now use circular avatars. The "10" has been obliterated and part of my head is missing. So I've created a quick way to preview avatar images to see how they'll look on both squares and circles. It places a simple…
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