I’ve had a Gravatar account for some time now but there’s a problem with it – I don’t always want to leave the same email on all blogs. There’s another problem with the service – it’s offline currently, not accepting new users. Another problem and probably one of the reasons the service went down is also the centralized hosting of images.
For the reasons above I think Pavatar is a better solution. The idea is to retrieve the avatar image from the URL, not the email. You have a few options to provide a Pavatar link (http header, link in the html or simply /pavatar.png). The image is always downloaded from your site which might be a partybreaker if you’re a heavy commenter but better since you control the image at all time.
Today I stumbled upon MonsterID as a fallback for Gravatars. I loved it. I had to do something with it. I downloaded the script written by Andreas Gohr, released under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License and changed it a bit. Well actually a lot. I added local caching and the possibility of adding other templates – I work at an interactive agency so I think I’ll be able to find a few characterbuilding image sets lying around.
The MonsterID service is here for anybody to use. It’s probably going to be as popular as the Pingerator.