Rob Buckley – Freelance Journalist and Editor

The MyBlogLog service has many useful features, including an avatar function linked to web sites that works in a similar way to Gravatar's. Unlike Gravatar, however, there are no Movable Type plug-ins that allow you to find out the avatar for a given commenter*. Until now.

MT-MyBlogLog works with both dynamic and statically published Movable Type pages and generates the URL of the commenter's avatar.

Use

Just include <MTMyBlogLog> wherever you'd like to have the URL appear, provided it's within a <MTComments> block.

For example, <img src="<MTMyBlogLog>" width="25" height="25" align="left" /> would position and resize the avatar to your specifications.

The tag takes one attribute: 'default'. If you don't want to use the default MyBlogLog avatar for anyone who hasn't included a URL with their comment on your blog, you can include a path or URL in the 'default' attribute as an alternative.

eg <img src="<MTMyBlogLog default="/images/default.gif">" width="25" height="25" align="left" />

Installation

Download and extract the zip file. Put the contents of the plugins folder into your MovableType plugins directory, located at <MT Install Dir>/plugins, and the contents of the php folder's plugins folder into <MT Install Dir>/php/plugins. Once the file is placed in the plugins directory, it is immediately available for use in your template files. Make sure the permissions on the MTMyBlogLog.pl file are set to 755.

Download the plugin (1.0)

Support

Email me at

* Allegedly, if you include the MyBlogLog JavaScript or widget in your web site, avatars will appear next to comments. However, I've never got this to work and I don't especially want the JavaScript or widget embedded in my blogs.

Last updated: September 13, 2007