MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback

MonsterID as Gravatar Fallback Today I stumbled across a link at Simon Willison's blog: Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification Smart (and pretty) trick for showing a representation tied to a commenter’s IP address without affecting their privacy It is very cool indeed. Don Park's idea is to use a commenter's IP address to generate a pretty graphic from a few basic shapes. By combining multiple types of shapes, different colors and rotation it is possible create a lot of different graphics. They then can be used as a kind of avatar to make comments by the same poster easy to spot. He calls this “identicon”, you can see the one generated for my IP on the right. Here at my blog I currently use the Gravatar service to display avatars in the comments. Unfortunately this means users need to sign up at the Gravatar site1). Only a few commenters already did that, for all others a boring “no avatar” image is displayed. Fortunately Gravatar lets you send them a redirect URL with the query…