MyBlogLog Avatar WordPress Plugin

260 words | Last Updated: February 21, 2008 |

In an effort to encourage people to join MyBlogLog.com, I've installed MyAvatars: A WordPress Plugin for MyBlogLog.

Let's see if this works properly: MyBlogLog members who leave a comment in this blog will have their avatars appear along with their comment.

What will this achieve? More traffic for your site.

As more people join MyBlogLog, they will visit your site. If you look at the righthand column of this page, you'll see the recent visitors who are MyBlogLog members. You'll also notice that their names are clickable, which means they have the opportunity to get visits from the readers of ManuelViloria.com

It's a win-win situation because MyBlogLog encourages site visits.

I'm hoping the MyAvatars plugin will help increase the number of comments here. (Somehow this reminds me of the old Themestream days...)

BONUS: If you want your visitors to read more pages in your site, then check out ConnectedInternet's Best Wordpress Engagement Plugins: Make Users Read More Posts, where you'll learn about which posts were recently read by your visitors, which are popular, and which are related.

(Found out about ConnectedInternet.co.uk thanks to ABowlOfStupid.com)

UPDATE: Here's where I inserted the call to the MyAvatars function in the comments.php file --

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"MyBlogLog Avatar WordPress Plugin"
First Posted: January 18, 2007 | Filed in: Web Traffic Wordpress

18 Comments »

18 Responses to “MyBlogLog Avatar WordPress Plugin”

1. on 18 Jan 2007 at 11:18 am 1 Manuel

   Testing if the MyAvatars plugin was correctly installed... (had to tweak the css file)

2. on 18 Jan 2007 at 12:06 pm 2 word_sling

   There you go, Manuel. Tested it. Nice informative site, all the way from here in Los Angeles.

3. on 18 Jan 2007 at 4:10 pm 3 Napolux

   Very cool CSS styling Can I use it in my blog???

4. on 18 Jan 2007 at 6:01 pm 4 Manuel Viloria

   @Word_Sling - Thanks for helping out! (On another note... any relation to Mr. Go Negosyo?)

   @Napolux - I just used float left in the css file of your MyAvatars plugin. The styling of the avatar (white border, shadow) is based on the Nigarila Theme.

5. on 18 Jan 2007 at 7:05 pm 5 pinoyblogosphere

   PBS is a mybloglog member cool plugin huh. i'll gonna install this plugin at the PBS Group blog too. yuhoooooo. thanks manny!

   Forum: http://www.pinoyblogosphere.org
   GroupBlog: http://www.pinoyblogosphere.com

6. on 19 Jan 2007 at 12:43 am 6 Christy Barber

   Very cool! I hope this works for you!

7. on 19 Jan 2007 at 7:14 am 7 Manuel Viloria

   Thanks, PBS and Christy!

8. on 17 Feb 2007 at 1:37 pm 8 TallFreak

   I tried to get this plugin to work but napolux talks about adding a code to the comments.php but he's very confusing about it. What did you add to your comments.php file?

9. on 17 Feb 2007 at 4:55 pm 9 Manuel Viloria

   Hi TallFreak,

   I've updated this post by including a screenshot (see above) of where I placed the call to the MyAvatars function. I don't know how your comments.php file looks like, but the call will come after this line:

   <?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

   and just right before this line:
   <cite><?php comment_author_link() ?></cite>

   I hope that helps!

   What the heck... to save time, here's the screenshot:
   

10. on 28 May 2007 at 10:02 am 10 Manuel Viloria

    Stack errors in IE because of the MyBlogLog Avatar plugin? Thank you to Ross of QuotesInCan.com for letting me know about stack overflow error.

    And a big thank you to Spud Oregon for the post on How to solve the stack overflow error.

    If you choose to copy/paste Spud's workaround code, please make sure your quotes are ordinary quotes ("") and not smart quotes (“”).

    
    <img class="MyAvatars" border="0" src="<?php echo $mybloglog_IMG; ?>" 
    height="48" width="48" alt="MyAvatars 0.2"/>
    

11. on 09 Jun 2007 at 4:47 am 11 ross

    Thank you Manny for this plugin. I don't know if I'm going to have any problem about stack overflow error, but I'll try it.

12. on 30 Oct 2007 at 5:49 pm 12 David Bradley

    Anyone tried Gravatars...they're more universal than MyBlogLog, you associate your globally recognised avatar with the email accounts with which you post to blogs and your mugshot shows up as and when (assuming the blogmeister has enabled Gravvies on the site)

    More info here - http://site.gravatar.com/

    db

13. on 12 Nov 2007 at 12:25 am 13 Maki

    I still haven't fixed that plugin. I'm having trouble where to exactly put the code in my comments.php I tried the screenshot but it still does not work.. I really want that plugin

14. on 12 Nov 2007 at 1:56 am 14 Manuel Viloria

    Hi Maki! Have you tried putting the reference to MyAvatars just before this line in the Mandigo theme's comment.php (line 32):

    < ?php printf(__('%s says:','mandigo'),comment_author_link()); ?>

15. on 21 Apr 2008 at 10:23 am 15 zwinky

    cool style!

16. on 07 May 2008 at 2:29 am 16 Shane

    Manuel,

    I just released a new plugin that provides this same functionality but that supports both Gravatar and MyBlog simultaneously and that fixes the bugs that were in the last release of MyAvatars. I'd love to hear your thoughts!

    http://www.askshane.org/wordpress-avatars

    Thanks,
    Shane

17. on 08 May 2008 at 6:34 am 17 Manuel Viloria

    Shane, your WordPRess Avatars plugin works well! I solved the stack overflow issues by removing the padding settings in the css stylesheet (for images).

18. on 20 May 2008 at 7:16 am 18 Manuel Viloria

    Shane shared with me this wonderful idea: Why not build the frame and shadow around the image using a DIV tag?

    So I used this:

    div.avatars2
    {
    background:url(img/shadow.gif) no-repeat right bottom;
    width: 48px;
    height: 48px;
    padding:4px 10px 10px 4px;
    border-top:#eee 1px solid;
    border-left:#eee 1px solid;
    }

    The stack overflow errors are gone, and we have a nice frame with shadow effect for those viewing the comments using Internet Explorer.

    All we need to figure out now is how show the same effect in Firefox.