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Do you work for Gravatar? (Score:2)
Re:Do you work for Gravatar? (Score:2)
Because...
1) It was easy to implement.
Which is very important as I wanted to have Graham and Andreas do as little work as possible in order to have the best chance them to agree to it. I've been kicking around this idea for a long time and Gravatar solved a whole lot of problems all at once. Rather than wibble another year we JFDI'd. Remember "rough consensus and running code"? That.
Now we have something working and can play with and improve rather than the idea just rotting in my brain.
2) At the level we need, it's free beer.
They want $10 to have multiple email addresses on a single account, so just make one account for your CPAN address and one for your regular address. Slightly inconvenient, but you gets what you don't pay for. *shrug* I have no problem using free beer services if they get the job done.
3) It's a service with a documented protocol.
I'm tired with how so much of CPAN is difficult to access as an API or undocumented. Even just the simple act of "what modules were written by this author" is non-trivial to get programmatically. Gravatars allow *anyone* to look up an author's picture based on their PAUSE ID. Maybe rt.cpan.org will start using it.
4) It plays well with others.
And by "others" I mean "not Perl people". I'm tired of Perl coming up with Yet Another Custom Service that doesn't talk to anything else out there. This is part of the reason we're invisible outside our bubble, we don't play well with others. And maybe some CPAN devs will start playing with Gravatars outside of CPAN and increase our visibility just a little bit more and reverse the "Perl is dead" trend.
I've now got Thunderbird setup to display gravatars. If it was a custom CPAN thing that would not be possible.
5) It's so simple, we can leave if we need to.
The Gravatar protocol is so trivial that if we needed to take our things and go home I could write up a basic server in about an hour. Gravatar::URL even already has the provision to change servers.
6) Everything's cached.
Graham caches all the pictures locally so if gravatar goes tits up we still have them all.
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