Good bits, and enabled here Learning – is good. As WordPress notes at the bottom right of their page : Code – is poetry.
What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that’s required is your email address. Once you’ve signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar enabled sites!
Setting up gravatars on your site is easy, you don’t even need an account! Plugins are available for leading blog software and content management systems, and our tutorials will have you running gravatars in no time. To request a gravatar from our servers, you simply add an image to your users activity with an “src” attribute that points to our gravatar image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the user’s email address. Since all gravatars are rated with an MPAA style rating, you can restrict your site to show only gravatars whose content you are comfortable with.
Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users. Created by Tom Werner, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web. Avatars are usually an 80px by 80px image that the user will create themselves.
Gravatars in blog post comments
A Gravatar is essentially the same thing, but they are all hosted on a single server and are called up by encrypting the users’ email address via the MD5 algorithm. So instead of having one avatar on one forum you visit, and another at a blog you visit, you could have the same avatar at both.
I did not include gimped tools from the Thawte / Verisign company, as they only check their own certs.
These tests are done over the ‘net so may not be suitable for internal / LAN type sites. But they also don’t require anyone to have tech knowledge, or make you use an openssl binary to connect manually from the command line. Nor do they require you to bug anyone, asking if they can browse to it successfully, heh. By all means, as always if you have a good link for other resources, just comment and I’ll add it.
J.
P.S. For simple encryption without needing to verify anything but domain ownership, it’s pretty hard to beat Godaddy. If you are interested in cheap, non business class, I’d recommend you scout out any of the $12.99 per year promo discount codes for them; they were already significantly cheaper than most other folks at $30 per year, but $13 is better. Yep. A company I dealt with last month paid on the order of $200 per cert, in bulk prepaid lots no less (!) for effectively the same cert from one of the original vendors. That’s just not necessary in 2009 folks.
It’s not so much that it costs less per year than the “Deluxe” SSL Wildcard, but if you check, the Deluxe has a max 3 year lifespan; their cert is good for 5 years total. In essence, they got 5 years of SSL capability (trusted by that same 99.3% of browsers as other folks tout) for actually tens of thousands of sites, for $900 or less. I get no commission from GoDaddy, but I think there’s a reason they’re beating the heck out of the rest of the industry in new SSL cert issuance.
In EV land, 2 years is the max, and there is no wildcard option due to tighter security requirements (as well as simple business sense, ahem). EV makes great sense if you’re taking credit card orders on a screen; that should hopefully only be one website.
WordPress 2.8.4: Security ReleaseAugust 11, 2009 Yesterday a vulnerability was discovered: a specially crafted URL could be requested that would allow an attacker to bypass a security check to verify a user requested a password reset. As a result, the first account without a key in the database (usually the admin account) would have its password reset and a new password […]
Upcoming WordCampsAugust 6, 2009 Every now and then I see someone ask in the dev channel how they can meet up with other local WordPress developers. We’re thinking about ways to make WordPress.org more of a resource to facilitate local connections, but in the meantime, I thought it might be helpful to publicize some upcoming WordCamps, the [...]
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This is not some sort of challenge for crackers with too much time on their hands. But in installing all of this good WordPress stuff, I’ve been trying to make it not only quick and functional, but relatively secure.
I’ll detail some of the steps, and come back and update this as I go.
http://ocaoimh.ie/wp-super-cache/ is enabled, & stuff™. Blogs can chew up a lot of resources, so hoping this one isn’t slow for visitors. We’re all pretty spoiled in these here broadband days. Why, when I was growing up, we had to WALK to and from the internet. Up hill. Yes, both ways.
There’s a ton to do yet, to come even with a second grader in functionality and looks. That’s what happens when you’re years late to the party, hah!
Well met friends. Like all of the cool kids, I too wanted to blog. OK, perhaps just trying to be cool. Or a kid. Or something.
Not that there will be astounding wisdom here (though I’ll post close approximations from others) but it’s both a technological process (learn-to-RUN-the-blog), and fun.
Sure, I could be smart and host this ready-made on someone else’s wonderful, free, pre-rolled spot. But noooo, that’d be much too easy; no .com for me, I hit the .org to get into both the nit and the grit. I need to dive into the php, and config files, and mysql don’t y’know.
Anyway, I feel sure this’ll be a great excuse to quit thinking about optimizing mod_rewrite sections (though Apache does rock). Browsing the DH wiki has been a useful start in the learning, as has Google of course, plus the WP site itself. API keys, oh my.
I’m sure lots of the tech will filter over into this, as well as the usual pithy comments. I’ll try to toss a gem out there every now and then of course, to help your nerves. As well as a few random movie quotes.
Learning – is good. As WordPress notes at the bottom right of their page : Code – is poetry. 
looks from other folks / outside. These tools may help.
