Aggravatar

You’re a handsome devil. What’s your name?

It’s getting so a person doesn’t want to let the world outside his four walls know how he’s looking anymore. This morning, as I’m swaying gently in the hammock on the screened-in porch, I took a quick snap with Photo Booth:

Now, Photo Booth has a very convenient button for assigning the picture in question as your iChat Buddy Picture. Click, scale, click. Done and done.

For everything else, though. It’s a slog-fest of tabbing, clicking, finding, selecting, submitting. What an incredible hassle. But you, my loyal readers, are worth it. As are the various contacts who care about me in my various other online services. So, we copy the image, break out Acorn, crop it to a nice square, and save it out:

First, in an act of unbridled optimism, we update Gravatar. That optimism pays off a little bit by now. All three of GitHub, Bitbucket, and Stack Overflow use Gravatar for their account avatars. The optimism wears thin soon after, as you’re left to update the following on your own:

Skype, Gizmo, Flickr, Twitter, Tumblr, Momentile, LinkedIn, Facebook, Launchpad, Dopplr, and Tripit. Am I missing any? Undoubtedly. Even some I probably use.

Why don’t these services get it?

If the mountain will not come to me, I will go to the mountain.

Philippe Casgrain created, and open sourced a project called AvatarManager that has all the potential to shore up these disparate, siloed services who each want their own damn copy of my pretty face. It at least (in principal) automates the above steps. The plans are there for plugins, though I’m not terribly thrilled with his use of mechanize for screen scraping. It seems plausible enough to use one of a number of HTTP libraries out there and poke values directly into these various services. The main pain point is: Enumerating the submission schemes and providing credentials for all these services. I’ve cloned his repo and will be playing with it a bit, as it’s becoming an overwhelming itch.