Favatar-Revised Plugin Released

  • Based on work by Joen and Paul, I have put together a Favicon Plugin.

    Why not use Joen’s, you might ask? It kills your page load times – a failing he acknoledged. This plugin avoids that.

    There is a trade off, this plugin will increase the time it takes for a user to post a comment, but we’re talking, 2-3 seconds. Perhaps a version or two down the line I can eliminate that slow down as well.

    Anyway, here’s what it does:

    Place a customer “favatar” next to each users comment. Favatars are based on a users favicon. (Read more about this in Joen’s post.)

    When a user posts a comment, the script kicks in. If they have entered a URL, the script will attempt to download the HTML page from that url. With that HTML page, it will extract the “src” attribute from the “link” element. (If no link element exists, then the favicon URL is guessed)

    At this point, the plugin will actually ping the favicon url to see if we got it right, then upon success store that URL in the ‘comments’ table.

    Useage is very simple: just add <?php comment_favicon(); ?> inside your comment loop just link any other comment template function. All set!

    Download Favicon-Revised

    Let me know if you use it.

    Also, I hope to create a “catch up” function that will allow you to scan all previous comments and run the script on them to generate favatars for them. Expect that later.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 27 total)

  • This is a killer idea.

    might i ask you a favor? please post this in .zip format for those on other platforms?

    : )

    Moderator James Huff

    (@macmanx)

    Just a thought, but you might want to change the name to “Favatar-Revised”, as people may confuse its function with favicons (the custom icons for URLs). In fact, the only reason I came to this thread was to say, “Why do you need a plugin for that? Why not just upload favicon.ico to your root directory like everyone else?” So, a name change would probably good. Other than that, nice plugin.

    Thread Starter chuyskywalker

    (@chuyskywalker)

    @dss: MacOSX and Linux can open RAR files natively, and on a PC you can use WinRAR.

    But since you asked.

    @macmanx: Ah, good point. “Revised” ??

    Thread Starter chuyskywalker

    (@chuyskywalker)

    Version 1.0 Out!

    Big update really. Adds support for trackbacks and pingbacks. Also includes “favatise.php” which will process every comment on your blog attempting to assign favicons to comments/tracks/pings. (this way you can install it and it would just be “new” comments with favatars.)

    very nice! it should give some rest to the gravatar.com server!
    Lets see if it is fast enough to compete with gravatar.

    excellent! thank you!!!

    This just a note to point out that I am using this plugin, and it works perfectly. No conflicts, no problems, and no increased post times that I have noticed at all.

    I have also run “favatise.php”, it was dead easy: just place it next to my index.php, run it through the browser, and grind my teeth for a ?? hour while it processed all my comments. No problems at all here.

    Use favatars as an alternative to gravatars. Favatars rely not on one server alone, but is sort of “peer” based and relies on the servers of each commenter individually. It is not superior to gravatars, but when the gravatar servers may fail, favatars won’t.

    yup, plugin works really well.
    I now have BOTH favatars and gravatars now, so Ill have to decide the best way to use them.

    Hm. I followed the directions and added the <?php comment_favicon(); ?> to my comment loop, but they’re not showing up. I even ran the favitise script (which, with over 14,000 comments took hours), and they’re not showing up, either.

    Whah!

    VenomousKate,

    There’s a newly discovered conflict with Subscribe To Comments 1.4.2 (and possibly below). If you’re using that plugin, try upgrading to 1.4.4 — that might fix it.

    I’m not using Subscribe (although I was just sitting here and thinking about installing it this morning).

    Try disabling all plugins BUT the favatar plugin, (and make sure you haven’t modified wp-comments-post.php), and then try leaving a comment. If it still doesn’t work, then I have no idea why it won’t work. If it does, on the other hand, work, then one by one turn the plugins back on and see which one is the culprit.

    I’ll give that a try over the weekend. Thanks for the suggestion!

    I can’t get my own favatar to show on my site.

    Chris,

    Neither in IE or Firefox? IE is known to not read favicons very well, if they’re just a tad complex. Try viewing it in firefox, if that works, then you need to redo your favicon.

Viewing 15 replies - 1 through 15 (of 27 total)
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