After a year or so of not working on AVrAmTAR at all, I’ve released minor update for Wordpress plugin, which can be downloaded either from Wordpress plugin repository or you can upgrade automatically from within your Wordpress administration panel, as new versions of WP support automatic plugin upgrade.
This new version should fix PHP errors that non-administrator users saw after posting a comment.
Yesterday WordPress 2.5 RC1 was released and we are glad to say that our plugin for WP 2.3.x works on WP 2.5 RC1 also. Only thing you need to do is to turn off WP (Gr)avatars because we don’t want both avatars to be displayed (or we want? 
)
Just go to Settings / Discussion in your WP administration panel and set “Avatar display” to “Don’t show Avatars.”
Today we had short downtime because default bandwidth limit (5 GB) was exceeded (we could not imagine that AVrAmTAR will spend 5 GB in just one month). We have increased that limit now to 10 GB and hope it’ll be enough for now.
Sorry for inconvenience :/
I’ve been working whole day on this, so I hope users will like it more than previous design. New, fancy “Web 2.0″ (whatever that means 
) design is here. Completely tableless CSS styled design is here. Hope you’ll enjoy it!
Ruby on Rails example for API added. Thanks to Dejan Simić for making plugin for Rails. Hope someone will use it
Added three plugins/hacks, for WordPress, phpBB2 and phpBB3. Now your blog and/or forum can show AVrAmTAR avatars in no time. I think you won’t need more than five minutes to install each of these plugins.
Also, I’m searching for some fine “glassy” Web 2.0 designs, so you might expect redesign of website soon.
I have added examples on how to use API for following languages: Perl, ASP, ASP.NET (Visual Basic). More to come soon (I hope so). If there are any RubyOnRails, ColdFusion or similar programmers willing to provide example code – they can send examples to me.
Also, there is WordPress plugin in development (almost finished, it’s already installed on this blog), and this can be beginning of AVrAmTAR plugins/hacks era 
Okay, I’ve been working on AVrAmTAR API tonight, and basic API is done, but you should expect more languages and plugins for well known web applications soon. So far, we have AVrAmTAR URL, which is most important (whole API is based on it) and example of usage for PHP. Expect examples for more languages as Ruby on Rails, ASP, Java, etc… as well as plugins for popular forums/blogs/etc…
Several users contacted me these days and said that they’ve registered but they didn’t get confirmation email. I will try to figure out what’s wrong but whenever I try to register or change password – email arrives instantly, so I just can not fix the problem I can’t see.
Uh, I’ve almost forgot: Merry Christmas and happy New year to all! I have paused development these days but expect some news from AVrAmTAR soon
update: It seems that email server on our site fails to deliver messages from time to time. I have temporarily set website to send emails from GMail servers. Stay tuned!
Ok, I’ve spent couple of hours working on this, so I hope that it works
All users’ avatar URLs have been changed to http://avatars.avramtar.com/avatar-MD5_HASH_OF_EMAIL.gif, as you can see at your user page. Besides that, every user has an option to make custom avatar URL, something like http://avatars.avramtar.com/CUSTOM_IDENTIFIER.gif. Please note that once set, this custom URL can NOT be changed! Why? Well, because constant changing of avatar URL might broke your avatar on some websites which you do not visit so often (so you’ll forget to update them). So please double-check your identifier before you submit it. Also note that in custom identifier you can only use English alphabet letters (a-z) and digits (0-9). You can use uppercase letters but they will be converted to lowercase. Also, identifiers in URLs are not case-sensitive, so http://avatars.avramtar.com/user.gif is same as http://avatars.avramtar.com/User.gif and/or http://avatars.avramtar.com/uSEr.gif
Old user–USER-AT-DOMAIN-DOT-TLD.gif URLs will continue working for a while, but please change them to new URLs wherever you have used them as soon as possible.
When I started AVrAmTAR.com service, URLs were in form of http://avatars.avramtar.com/id-USERID.gif, where USERID was ID (number) of user in database. Then, a friend told me that anyone can just change (e.g. increase) ID number and see others’ avatars. I thought it was not a problem, as avatars are made to be seen, not? But again, someone might not like the fact that others can see his avatars. Then I’ve slightly modified system, so now your e-mail address is shown instead of ID. However, this also might be a problem, if spambots become able to recognize that user-AT-domain-DOT-tld is actually email adress (just replace -AT- with at (@) and -DOT- with dot (.)). I’ve came up with idea that I can change URLs to e.g. http://avatars.avramtar.com/avatar-MD5_HASH_OF_EMAIL.gif
I think that form of URLs will be the best choice, as other users can’t decrypt MD5 hash and therefore they can’t see your email address, nor your user ID. I will probably make changes to AVrAmTAR to get these links, and as I do not have much free time, until I find some time to do this, I want to see what other users think about this? Please vote:
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