A while back, I posted about implementing Favatars on this site. While I ran into many small issues, I was relatively happy with the feature. Since my upgrade to WP 1.5, I have wanted to re-implement the functionality without hacking WordPress. Luckily, Joen, with the help of Jeff Minard took the work I did (which was based on the work of Paul James) and turned the idea into a plugin which is now running on this site. The plugin was extremely simple to install and implement within my templates and is a great example of the maturity of WordPress and it community of users and developers.