hAvatar is a plugin for WordPress that displays avatars/photos for commenters based on the hCards contained in the URL they leave behind.

Given my recent fascination with microformats, it seemed like a cool thing to port to my blog.

When a comment is submitted, the commenter’s URL is parsed by hCardParser. If that hCard has a photo url, it returns it, otherwise it returns a link to a static no photo picture.

Additionally, there is a hAvatar discovery service(actually a quartz job) that iterates over the comments without a photo url and tries to parse the url for a hCard every six hours, if an url is present. This way, as more and more folks add hCards, the comments list will be get populated.

Given that it’s impossible to predict what information people will want to display, I haven’t published this as a plugin. Though I am only interested in a profile photo, others might want to retrieve a company name, nicknames, location or some other information the hCard creator provides. Or maybe they’d like to build a simplified hCard for their users.The hCardBuilder class and helper classes have been included in addition to hCard.

Entries with avatar images are here and here
Updated hCardBuilder
PhotoCheckerJob.groovy
hAvatar plugin for Wordpress
Online hCard Creator

** LinkedIn embeds hCard so if you have a photo in your profile, you're all set. **

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