Code Comments, Comment, Linkage

Unspecific Gravaty

I noticed this morning that my Gravatar icon in the comments isn’t working, which is odd – it was working fine yesterday.

So I went to the Gravatar Management area on Gravatar.com to check that everything was as it should be, but found that the hash that they were expecting – 28cd6950f10df8311388f3edb13f70be – was different from the one that was being generated at my end – 4d91675dc4500f3dfa028bd776450422. How very strange, I thought. I tried using different methods to generate the hash of my email address to see if that would help – switching between md5, md4, and other variants by way of the hash function, but none of them were generating the expected hash value.

I don’t think anything has changed at my end, so I’m going to assume that something is going down at the Gravatar.com end to cause it. I thought about removing the Gravatar images for the time being, but decided I’d leave them in place in the hope they fix it soon-ish.

Weird. 😐

// Update at 23:00

And just a few hours later the Gravatars are working again, yet the generated hash hasn’t changed at this end.

Must have been gremlins. 😉

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Code Comments

The Dream that Died

Matt Mullenweg has an interesting post up about the bugs in Dreamweaver CS3 hampering his productivity. I only just got this installed a couple of months back at work and I haven’t made much use of it yet due to using Eclipse for my work with the Java guys, but I figured I’d go back to Dreamweaver as soon as I’m back on a PHP project.

Back in the day, before I made the transition to Dreamweaver, I loved Allaire’s Homesite (shortly after they’d bought the rights from Nick Bradbury)- back before Macromedia acquired Allaire and sounded the death knell for the app. From mid 1998 until the whole Macromedia v Adobe toolbar lawsuit rendered it unusable, I must have opened Homesite almost every single day of the year. I even missed it while I was on holiday!

Finally I went over to the Dreamweaver camp when I couldn’t take the lack of maintenance on Homesite any longer, although strangely I did receive an email from someone deep within a Macromedia bunker who asked what I’d like to see in Homesite 6. Obviously that never seen the light of day, and I imagine the acquisition of Macromedia by Adobe all but put the coffin in the ground even if the final nail wasn’t in place by then, but I notice that at the time of writing that Adobe still has the Homesite product page up.

I now use Eclipse at work, but I don’t love using it in the way I did Homesite and later Dreamweaver. If DW is bloated, Eclipse is ridiculously obese. I’d go back to Homesite in a heartbeat if they ever did release a new one, though – sometimes the bloat of Dreamweaver just isn’t necessary when all you want is a powerful, customisable code editor.

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Code Comments

Gravatars, finally.

With some time to spare yesterday I finally got round to implementing Gravatars on the site here, so that folk with a “globally recognised avatar” will see their avatar appear beside their comments.

In the event it was a piece of cake – there’s a WordPress plugin that you install, and then all that’s needed is to stick a line beside where user comments go in the comments.php file of your template.

<img src="<?php gravatar('R', 45) ?>" alt="gravatar" class="alignleft" />

I used the line of code above to insert a 45 pixel icon beside the <cite> tag in the template.

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