Archive for December, 2006

Pavatar is a decentralized, URL based, avatar discovery system. An avatar is an internet user’s representation of themself in the form of a icon image. From the site:

The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user. An example would be if you made a comment or a site posting where an avatar is required.

A pavatar is simply an 80×80 pixel icon image in GIF, JPG, or PNG format. Given a URL, http://example.com/, it’s pavatar is easily discovered using the following algorithm:

1. HTTP fetch http://example.com/ looking for the X-Pavatar HTTP header. If present, the contents will be the URL of the pavatar.
2. If the X-Pavatar header is not present, parse the HTTP response, looking for <link rel=”pavatar” href=”http://example.com/my-pavatar.png” /> in the HEAD section of the page. If present, the contents of the HREF attribute is the URL to the pavatar.
3. Fetch http://example.com/pavatar.png, just like browsers look for favicon.ico

With OpenID, the user already proves that they own a URL, and if that URL also supports pavatar, then relying parties may autmatically set the user’s icon. How cool would it be to just log into ClaimID or Ma.gnolia for the first time and not have to upload a user icon? Very cool! I really like where this is going, so I’ve pavatar enabled brianellin.com, which also happens to be my OpenID.

More info at pavatar.com. digg this.

Yahoo! developer Simon Willison has put together a comprehensive screencast on what OpenID is and how to use it.

You should never make changes right before a demo, right? More →

Today we got word that our affiliate signup process wasn’t redirecting users back to affiliates’ web sites. More →

A while back my co-worker Grant had the idea for an OpenID based CAPTCHA service. CAPTCHA is an acronym for “Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart”, and takes the form of those registration images with bent numbers and letters. Users signing up for new sites confirm the code in the CAPTCHA image to prove they human and not an evil spam robot.

Enter botbouncer.com:

BotBouncer.com is a free CAPTCHA service for OpenIDs. We provide an API for finding out if a user has filled out our CAPTCHA. We also provide a simple mechanism for OpenID Enabled sites to send there users over here to fill out our CAPTCHA.

Essentially, you fill out a CAPTCHA one time and you won’t have to enter another captcha at sites that uses the botbouncer API.

Bot bouncer is useful for website operators because they:

• Don’t have to implement CAPTCHA
• Lowers the sign-up barrier for users who have already entered a CAPTCHA

And is useful for OpenID users because:

• They don’t have to jump through flaming CAPTCHA hoops all the time.

I like botbouncer because it is one of the first apps out there that uses OpenID for something more than single-sign-on. Very cool.

JanRain is pleased to announce BotBouncer.com which will be run as a free service for the OpenID community. More →