[listening (by the end of this post, at least): A Piece of Forever from the album “Fledgling” by Dert (2004)]
Wouldn’t you know it, the first day i even discover gravatar, and upload my avatar, it went down (although it got rated during that time–props). It was down for a little over a day, due to the host, Dreamhost, shutting it down because of excessive CPU usage.
First off, i’m tripping that 23million gravatars have been served (expressed by the site) and it’s been the doing of one person and one host?! Both somewhat impressive, and foolish at the same time. I wonder how long gravatars have been in existence?
At any rate, i supported dude and donated help him host the gravatars on a dedicated server, and he has mentioned that he implemented some code that will make serving the gravatars less CPU-intensive.
What i dig about the gravatar service (and i’ve implemented it on my site now:get a gravatar, and you can use it when you comment on the site) is that they have the notion of rating the gravatars, using an MPAA-style rating scheme. Of course we would like to have the choice to display certain ratings of avatars on our site, so that’s a smart call. This of course makes it necessary to centralize the serving of the images…of course everything’s possible, so here’s a thought, bantered about (incomplete, you have been warned)…
Why not let gravatar owners host the gravatar on their own site as well? Perhaps have a server or servers, that will handle the “uploading” of the avatar you choose to use on your site, so that the moderator(s, hopefully at some point) may rate the gravatar, and the system simultaneously generate an MD5 (or whatever kind of) checksum on the image file. I have “uploading” in quotes, because part of the process will be to point to the URL of your gravatar, and gravatar host will “suck” in the URL to the image file at the time of uploading, then generate the MD5. The local database (or whatever he’s using) will contain the desired user’s gravatar URL on their local box, the MD5 checksum, i presume rating, and whatever other information. The client requests the gravatar URL as usual. The server hits the appropriate host, grabs the image, generates the MD5 and compares it to the already rated one, and if it exists, allows the gravatar URL to be displayed on the site.
I can see a couple of problems with this approach:
1) will this be faster than just serving the little image? Dunno.
2) The above approach puts the burden of hosting on the client, so that if the client has posted to a gang of blogs, the poor gravatar owner’s now responsible for the bandwidth. This is probably worse in the end than a single, big dedicated server, serving the image from one place…then maybe not, if the gravatar owner doesn’t care, or opts to do things this way.
So nevermind. it may sound wack now but it was dope at the time.
However, if you do want to keep things decentralized however, i think that this is a possible option.