Surrogator - free avatar image server

I hereby announce the release of Surrogator version 0.1.0, a simple Libravatar compatible avatar image server written in PHP.

Libravatar?​

You probably know Gravatar, the (proprietary) service by the Wordpress.com guys. You give it the md5 hash of an email address and get an image for it - given that the person owning the email address registered there and uploaded a picture.

Many many blog and web applications use those images to give comments a personal note and make it easy to recognize the commenters.

Libravatar (libre avatar) does basically the same, but has some huge benefits:

• It is federated, which means that you can host your own avatar server for your domains. In case Libravatar.org or Gravatar are down, images for your email addresses will still be delivered.
• You can use it as a service like Gravatar if you don't want to host your own server. But unlike Gravatar - which you cannot leave - you have full control over your avatars and your account. Full account export and removal are supported.
• You can assign images to OpenIDs.
• It is open source. The Libravatar sources are open for anyone to inspect, improve and install on your own server.
• It falls back to Gravatar. The userbase of Gravatar is not to be neglected, so Libravatar falls back to the Gravatar image if there is no Libravatar one.
• You do not have to register another account but may login with your OpenID.

Surrogator?​

The original Libravatar software is written in Python and contains the whole package: Profiles, login, image upload, email and OpenID management.

I do not need all that; all I want is to put an image file foo@example.org.png somewhere, and that's it. This is Surrogator.

Just download (or git clone) Surrogator, follow the 4 setup steps, put the image files in the raw/ directory and that's it. It just works and takes little server resources.

Services_Libravatar​

So Libravatar is cool, how can you use it? Luckily, Melissa Draper wrote the Services_Libravatar library which is documented and easily installable via PEAR or Pyrus:

$ pear install services_libravatar-alpha

Using it is as easy as writing four lines of code:

<?php
require_once 'Services/Libravatar.php';
$sla = new Services_Libravatar();
$imgUrl = $sla->getUrl('foo@example.org');
echo '<img alt="Avatar" src="' . htmlspecialchars($imgUrl) . '"/>';

That's it. Now start using free avatar images in your software, and use one of the available plugins.