Greg at Life On Mars is hacking together icons for Moveable Type comments (via 0xDECAFBAD). The magic happens when a comment is posted with a URL for the author, the script goes to the author’s site and looks for its RSS feed. If the RSS feed has an image tag, that image is used. Yikes that’s cool.
He’s planning on supporting FOAF which I think is a much more elegant solution for this. A persons’ FOAF file (or files) mediates their online persona for them, a buddy icon being part of that. I think RSS images should be used for TrackBacks, but FOAF images for comments. My thinking is this: comments and FOAF are related to people while TrackBacks and RSS are related to sites.
I actually want to see this taken one step further, where people with FOAF files are autodetected and linked as user profiles. TypePad already generates FOAF files and LiveJournal’s working on it, it would be great to see FOAF more integrated with the web.
2 responses to “Moveable Type Comment Icons”
Wow, I missed that LJ was working on producing FOAF. That would be very cool, especially if they did it clean and correct. It’d instantly supply a gigantic volume of FOAF data to play with. Nice!
I’m trying to get this to work but ImageMagick is being a fucktard on my server… I may just recode it using NetPBM