Archive for December, 2007

New AVrAmTAR URLs

Tuesday, December 25th, 2007

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.

Form of avatar URLs

Thursday, December 20th, 2007

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:

Will you use AVrAmTAR services?

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Welcome

Tuesday, December 18th, 2007

Hello, hello, hello!

Welcome to the AVrAmTAR.com blog. I just wanted to wish warm welcome to everyone.

If you have any ideas how can we improve AVrAmTAR, just shoot, and we will read and consider every one of them. And please, do not be too hard on us, as this service is in BETA and is in constant development :-)

Keep AVrAmTARing…!