SignID: an avatar as an alternative to Identicon, and MonsterID Wavatar
 | What is an avatar?An avatar is an image generated uniquely identifiable from each commentator on a blog in order to associate the various comments to users. To do this can be considered the IP address, but doing so would have different avatars for the same user who commented in two sessions (with different IP), separated, or email address. |
This image uniquely identifies a user, some sites allow registration and entering your avatar. This necessarily leads to the interference that can post a comment you must first have made a recording. The way to overcome this problem exists and is very simple. There are some sites, the best known is Gravatar which combines an image to a hash. The hash can be calculated from the email address of the user while the image may be a Identicon, or MonsterID Wavatar as shown.
 Identicon |  MonsterID |  Wavatar |
Using this technique also has the advantage of anonymity to leave comments, even if your avatar was created based on his email is impossible to go back to your email address. This is guaranteed by the fact that there is an inverse function of the hash.
SignID
Assuming that an avatar has the same function as a signature very cryptic, I wanted to create another type of avatar like a real signature short. The process is much simpler precedents, because we know the same functionality the simpler procedure is preferable as it teaches Occam.
The idea is very simple, we consider the image as if it were a Cartesian plane and divide the hash in a series of coordinates. For example, if we 261d832de29d0923db96989c4640dfdd we can draw on our floor the following points (2.6), (1, D) (8.3), (2, D) ... by coordinates expressed in hexadecimal. We got a number of issues we have to unite with the lines and a beautiful SignID here we can see in this picture.
SignID
Using SignID
You can use as an alternative to the more noble SignID avatar. Given an email address, for example mail@example.com the first thing to do is to compute the hash address, you can use the functions available to the language being used like 'md5. 333a3587d4c6757b04c86b47fbafc64a The URI 'avatars will SignID http://www.piumalab.org/avatar/333a3587d4c6757b04c86b47fbafc64a
For those who want to insert a SignID your site in PHP is simply the following code
( ( string ) md5 ( $email ) ) ?> " /> <Img src = "http://www.piumalab.org/avatar/ <? Php echo ((string) md5 ($ email))?>" />
Attributes to customize SignID
All these attributes of which you speak are optional, you can specify the size with the parameter s, if not specified by default will be 80 pixels, eg http://www.piumalab.org/avatar/333a3587d4c6757b04c86b47fbafc64a?s=256
The default image format is PNG if you want to just specify a gif format = gif http://www.piumalab.org/avatar/333a3587d4c6757b04c86b47fbafc64a?format=gif
There are three parameters to specify colors. Are bg, lc and pc respectively which serve to set the background color, lines and points. The format of color must be expressed as 6 hexadecimal digits, according to the RGB format, 2 for red, 2 for green and 2 blue. All options can be combined as desired. here is an example of these three options http://www.piumalab.org/avatar/333a3587d4c6757b04c86b47fbafc64a?bg=99DD33&lc=234567&pc=FF55FF
One Response to "SignID: an avatar as an alternative to Identicon, and MonsterID Wavatar"
Savino Sasso - February 28th, 2009
I love it, bravo!
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