MyAvatars For MyBlogLog
written by John Chow
Last night, I added a MyBlogLog community for this blog. So far there are 90 community members. It is actually quite nice to put a face to my readers and see the blogs that they run as well. I’ve been having a great time exploring your blogs.
MyAvatars for MyBlogLog was pointed out to me by Hawaii Online Advertising. The Wordpress Plugin shows MyBlogLog avatars in the comments. Now, you can put a face to the commentator as well as the recent readers.
The Plugin is easy to install but the documentation could be better. Download the myavatars.zip file, unzip and upload it to your Plugins folder, then activate the Plugin in your Plugins page. Next, open up your comments.php file. You will need to add the following code inside the comment loop.
<?php if(function_exists("MyAvatars")) MyAvatars(); ?>
I put the above code directly before <?php comment_text() ?> but you can place it where you think it will look good. This MyAvatars Plugin really helps to add a sense of community to the blog. When paired with the Threaded Comments Plugin, the blog is looking almost forum like.
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(1 votes, average: 5 out of 5)
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First to test?
Second
I personally think Gravatar has more members than mybloglog. So I use gravatar on my blog.
Not the first at all, John added it already before he posted this
I think what he meant was that he was the first to test the avatar thing on John’s blog, not in general.
Well, Gravatar is better. When it works
It looks nice, and it is becoming closer and closer to a forum. why dont you start one
The avatars look nice indeed, I’m less happy about the links screaming to get your posts added to all those social bookmarking sites. If you ask me, people will add it to that kind of sites if they think it’s worth doing so, no matter if you put up the links or not. Please prove me wrong later with a detailed post, I’ll be glad to see all those blogs with 20+ bookmark icons actually do have use
I agree. I’ve played around with a few different plugins for the social bookmarking sites, but none seem to fit right.
Maybe the problem is that no one has created a popup menu for them. That might be a good thing to try. The list can just be so long that it doesn’t look very good.
I do like the icons, though. Kinda like a forum, yes, but this format makes all the same discussion about a specific topic easily to follow in sub topics.
Looks amazing
Yes, when will be seeing the JOhnChow.com forums? Im sure they would be succesful.
Well sponge me down, how cool is that?
I too joined MyBlogLog a few days ago, but I was lead there from the other direction: I wanted to have comment avatars, and gravatars have been down for such a long time that the MyAvatars plugin seemed like the best option. Of course, I then had to join MyBlogLog to get an avatar of my own… so far I have 1 community member
But it sure is nice to see faces I recognise commenting on the blogs I frequent… and the MyBlogLog recent readers widgets
I haven’t tried Gravatar myself, but apparently you aren’t the only one that finds it sometimes problematic. Maybe that explains why I never jumped on that bandwagon.
John, this plugin is just what I have been looking for. Thanks, much!
The guide worked great for my blog.
I’ve seen this used on other blogs, but didn’t have any idea how they did it. Now we know, and knowing is half the battle.
HA im installing this for sure!!!
Hi John,
With the IntelliText, AdSense, MyBlogLog widget, Text-Link-Ads, the ad above the post title, and now the MyBlogLog comment images aren’t you worried your site is getting a little “busy”?
A little busy is fine. Better busy than dead.
I’m glad you like it. I think it looks great!(Thanks for the link)
Part of me wants to agree with that. I think that “white space” and “simplicity” are undervalued in today’s web, where everyone wants to run every possible plug-in (etc) available to them. Like we talked about at pho on Saturday, the whole bit with Flash animations, background music, and so on.
I like the busy-ness. It adds a lot of useful features to the site and it seems more professional.
For some reason the ToolTip (look at my profile on mybloglog ??) is in spanish (?)
Heh yeah it is, the javascript contains some spanish/portuguese things :p
I will definitely put this on my blog. Well, as soon as i start writing content that gets comments.
Welcome to MBL John!! I’m your number 1 fan
Did you know that these avatars are not resized when they are uploaded? So a lot of them are large graphics files, and this site takes a really long time to load now.
And the blog is getting to be quite cluttered as well… Maybe it’s time for a new template that is a bit wider to accommodate all the ads and graphics
Indeed, I tried it at another blog I’m running and I had a couple of lads with pretty big avatars, really slowed down the loading, not to great if you ask me.
John Chow dot Com really is getting closer and closer to becoming a forum (although Mr. root of all evil is the only one that can start a new “thread”)
Maybe I should set up an avatar too.
maybe you should go with a 3 column theme john, so that you can spread the right sided column over into 2 diff columns.
John, How would you improve the documentation?
That’s pretty cool. I really like the avatars in the comments. That’s actually a nice feature. That might get me to sign up
Nope, looks like I can’t. My screen name is taken. Bummer.
I installed this on my site, but can’t seem to get the avatars to come on the right side of the text. Only above the text. How can I change this??