Favatars

Paul James presents an intriguing, and quite usable idea to provide ubiquitous, decentralized avatars (graphic representations of a person, usually seen in Web forums, chat rooms and instant messaging programs) throughout the Web. Favatars, as he has dubbed them, are the favicons that so many people already use on their site (look in the address bar of your browser, and you should see an orange block, with a white ‘A’, that’s my favicon). The idea has a lot of potential, and as it is so easy to implement, I expect to see it added to various blogging packages and content management systems in the future. He has already provided the PHP he uses to create Favatars in the comments on his site.

I have implemented Favatars in the comments here on this site. So, if you have a favicon on your Web site, and want to test, just leave a comment to this post.

To implement this, cut and paste the code he provided within the first set of php tags at the top of your index.php, I would recommend you place it right after the require (blog header) line. Then, to place the icon next to a comment, place the following code in your wp_comments.php page, wherever you want it to appear (remove the line breaks, they are there for readability only):

  $CommentIcon = getFavicon($comment->comment_author_url);
  echo '<img src="' . $CommentIcon . '"
             alt="' . $comment->comment_author_url . '"
             class="CommentIcon" height="16" width="16" />';