And on April Fool’s Day, there was a post from the Gravatar blog on a new gravatar algorithm — Unicorns<\/a>.<\/p>\n A gravatar, for those unfamiliar with the term, is a little graphic that represents the author of a comment, provided by gravatar.com<\/a>. It’s a free service; you set up an account, and wherever you post on the ‘net that uses the Gravatar service (as many WordPress-powered sites do), you maintain a consistent visual identity. And for people who haven’t signed up for the service, there are plugins that produce something other than a default image, keyed to the e-mail address. I used one that made goofy faces called Wavatar.<\/p>\n And now, there was a new service — Unicornify!<\/a>. People could have sparkles and unicorns and rainbows as their avatars.<\/p>\n Naturally, since it was April Fool’s Day, of course. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n (If you want to see what your Unicorn avatar would look like, click here<\/a> for the test page.)<\/p>\n WordPress guru Otto42<\/a> wrote a plugin that took advantage of the unicorn gravatar service, Unicornify<\/a>.<\/p>\n Since I like to tinker with my WordPress install, I downloaded the Unicornify plugin and installed it. It works by tapping into a WordPress hook; when a gravatar is called, instead of using the Gravatar service, the gravatar will be generated from the Unicornify service.<\/p>\n But I noticed something.<\/p>\n Because of the way the plugin worked, if someone had a registered gravatar, they wouldn’t see it. They would see, instead, the Unicorn gravatar.<\/p>\n Well! I decided that simply wouldn’t do. I don’t want to lose my Charles Schulz-esque Fourth Doctor gravatar<\/a> on my own website, after all. And so I deactivated the plugin.<\/p>\n Last weekend, I did some clean-up on my WordPress install, deleting some old plugins that I no longer needed.<\/p>\n I’d forgotten about Unicornify. I activated it, just for kicks, and then I wondered if, perhaps, I could make the plugin work the way I wanted it to work — generate a unicorn avatar for people without registered gravatars, but use the registered gravatar for those who have them.<\/p>\n I couldn’t see why this wouldn’t be doable.<\/p>\n I studied up on the WordPress codex; the Using Gravatars<\/a> article had some code for testing whether or not a gravatar is registered with the Gravatar service that would be useful:<\/p>\n The Unicornify plugin builds a URL to http:\/\/unicornify.appspot.com, and the Unicorn avatar link is built in exactly the same way that a link to gravatar.com is built. It occurred to me that if I tested the e-mail address that is passed through Unicornify to see whether or not a gravatar linked to that account exists, then I could determine which gravatar to call — the registered gravatar or the unicorn gravatar.<\/p>\n Genius!<\/p>\n So, I dropped that validate_gravatar function into the plugin, then wrote some code. Instead of the line:<\/p>\n I would do this:<\/p>\n if ( $registered_gravatar ) { As genius as this was…<\/p>\n It didn’t work.<\/p>\n It should<\/i> have worked. But some PHP config settings in my webserver were preventing it from working, and since I couldn’t change those, I wondered if I might be able to find a workaround.<\/p>\n The problem, as it turns out, was the get_headers function. It simply would not work with my server, probably due to the way that my webserver was upgraded from PHP4 to PHP5.<\/p>\n So, I turned to the source of all knowledge — the Internet. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n And, at php.net, I found a workaround. In their article on the get_headers function<\/a>, there were several workaround functions posted for pre-PHP5 servers. My server, I should note, is, in fact, a PHP5 server. But I thought the workaround might be a good solution, and so I dropped the code for one of those workarounds into the Unicornify plugin.<\/p>\n Lo and behold, it worked!<\/p>\n I made another change to the code. I eliminated the validate_gravatar function entirely, and instead integrated it into the unicornify function. There was no need to hash the e-mail address a second time; the Unicornify code already did that. The result was some simpler, less redundant code, and the result was this:<\/p>\n Until I get tired of it then — probably by Mid-Year’s Day — I’ll have unicorn gravatars for people who leave comments! Leave a comment and you’ll see your own colorful unicorn. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n For WordPress junkies who want the complete code, here’s the modified plugin<\/a>. Use Sparkles! Rainbows! Unicorns!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" It all began last year, on April Fool’s Day. As a longtime WordPress user, I frequently visit Planet WordPress, an aggregation blog of a number of top WordPress-specific blogs. And on April Fool’s Day, there was a post from the Gravatar blog on a new gravatar algorithm — Unicorns. A gravatar, for those unfamiliar withContinue reading “On Allyn’s Adventures With Unicorns”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4095],"tags":[58,759,4096],"class_list":["post-5708","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-wordpress","tag-php","tag-plugin","tag-wordpress","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5708"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5708\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5708"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5708"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5708"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Allyn's](\"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/graphics\/allyn-unicorn.jpg\")
That said, I had a pretty awesome unicorn gravatar, if I do say so myself. Rainbows!<\/p>\nfunction validate_gravatar($email) {
\n \/\/ Craft a potential url and test its headers
\n $hash = md5($email);
\n $uri = 'http:\/\/www.gravatar.com\/avatar\/' . $hash . '?d=404';
\n $headers = @get_headers($uri);
\n if (!preg_match(\"|200|\", $headers[0])) {
\n \t$has_valid_avatar = FALSE;
\n } else {
\n $has_valid_avatar = TRUE;
\n }
\n return $has_valid_avatar;
\n}<\/code><\/p>\n $host = 'http:\/\/unicornify.appspot.com';<\/code><\/p>\n $registered_gravatar = validate_gravatar ( $email );<\/p>\n
\n $host = 'http:\/\/www.gravatar.com';
\n $alt = 'Registered Gravatar';
\n } else {
\n $host = 'http:\/\/unicornify.appspot.com';
\n $alt = 'Unicorn Gravatar';
\n }<\/code><\/p>\n $uri = 'http:\/\/www.gravatar.com\/avatar\/' . $email_hash . '?d=404';
\n $headers = @get_headers($uri);
\n if (!preg_match(\"|200|\", $headers[0])) {
\n $host = 'http:\/\/unicornify.appspot.com';
\n $alt = 'Unicorn Gravatar';
\n } else {
\n $host = 'http:\/\/www.gravatar.com';
\n $alt = 'Registered Gravatar';
\n }<\/code><\/p>\nat<\/s> for your own peril<\/s> fun! :h2g2:<\/p>\n