Thursday May 15th 2008
Avatar-ing it up!
Back when my site used to be run by the Postnuke CMS (content management system), I used to be able to assign an avatar for each category. For example, on drunken rants (which were occasional back then), I had an image of me slamming a beer. Basically, it was a setup similar to Slashdot, and I kinda liked it.
When I finally had enough of Postnuke, as it seemed that the CMS was going no where and support for plugins was minimal at best (I don’t know if this is still the case), I switched to Wordpress, and never looked back. However, I didn’t know how to easily assign an image to each category, and truthfully, I was hoping to have something different for each post this time.
Ironically, one of the web comics I read every week, Ctrl+Alt+Del, has a setup sort of like how I wanted. Tim Buckley, the creator, draws his avatars, and sometimes has different ones depending on the post. For my posts, I sort of want to have a mix of either a snapshot of myself if I’m in a weird mood or desire to display my mood for the post, or even just a run-of-the-mill graphic. Basically, a mix of Ctrl+Alt+Del and Slashdot.
After a bit of searching, the plugin that I found that would let me do this is “Post Avatar” (original name, eh?!). You have the option of including the avatar within the post, or if you wish to use CSS, you can specify the CSS class name you’d want to use, and then configure that class within your style sheet. I opted for the latter, and knowing very little about CSS, I had the avatar popping up all over the place within the post, until I came across someone else who was doing sort of the same thing, but for putting avatars next to comments. Using Firebug, I was able to see the CSS class he used, and nab it. Applying it to my site too a bit to figure out, and also determine what size of avatar would be best, but again, Firebug helped me out with this, and so far, it looks pretty good (in my opinion, of course).
I don’t think I’m going to go back and update EVERY past post with an avatar, because even though I only have 105 posts (including this one), I’m quite lazy at heart… even if this endeavour did take a bit to put together. Slightly hypocritical, eh?
Anyway, hope you like these as much as I do. 
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