[fb_addgravatar get_avatar]: I…um…have no idea what this means but it’s probably very smart.

Very smart indeed.

I was searching for [fb_addgravatar get_avatar] about a week ago, and here’s why:

It all started when I noticed the default Gravatar on Outspoken Media is not the usual “Mystery Man” image–it is an image of your brand logo icon. I’ve always wanted to customize the default Gravatar on my site, but since the images were being pulled from gravatar.com, I assumed it wasn’t possible without some serious WP hacking. I inspected the image address for your logo icon and saw that it was being hosted at some kind of dynamic gravatar.com URL that contained your icon’s location (on outspokenmedia.com) as one of its parameters. So apparently, it’s possible to tell Gravatar where to pull your default image from?

I could have just asked you directly, but I didn’t want to admit that you might know something I don’t, so I investigated further by searching for something like [custom default gravatar thesis]. Much to my surprise…one of the top results was this Outspoken article: Adding Custom Default Gravatars to Your Blog.

The article included instructions for Thesis-based blogs that recommended adding this php code to the custom_functions.php file:

/* Add a Custom Default Gravatar */
if ( !function_exists(’custom_gravatar’) ) {
function custom_gravatar( $avatar_defaults ) {
$myavatar = get_bloginfo(’template_directory’) . ‘/custom/images/YOUR-CUSTOM-GRAPHIC-HERE.jpg’;
$avatar_defaults[$myavatar] = ‘NAME-YOU-GIVE-YOUR-AVATAR’;

return $avatar_defaults;
}
add_filter( ‘avatar_defaults’, ‘fb_addgravatar’ );
}

Unfortunately, this code didn’t work. After reading the comments on that article, I found out that this code doesn’t work for 2 reasons:

1. WordPress has changed the regular quotation marks and apostrophes into the fancy versions, via their “smart quotes” functionality. These need to be replaced with their original non-fancy versions (i.e. straight quotes) after the code has been pasted into the php editor.

2. The custom function was defined as custom_gravatar, but then when it was being “hooked” onto avatar_defaults, the custom function was referred to as fb_addgravatar. To correct this, the fb_addgravatar needs to be changed to custom_gravatar.

After I edited my code and got it working, I studied the originally-recommended code and tried to figure out where fb_addgravatar came from. My first suspicion was that it was a copy/paste error caused by reusing the code from the non-Thesis recommendation, but that wasn’t the case since it only appeared in the Thesis code recommendation. So…I went to Google and searched for fb_addgravatar, to see if I could locate the original source.

Unfortunately, this function name appeared on several different pages across many different websites. I still didn’t know if this was a well-known function name (e.g. written into the WP Codex or something) or just one man’s code being duplicated across the internet (I’ve heard that can be an issue sometimes).

I know that many WP programmers will prefix their custom functions’ names with a specific word or character string (e.g. their name or the name of the plugin they’re programming), and then follow it with a phrase that describes the function’s behavior. The prefix helps human readers understand the scope of each function, and it also mitigates the chances of conflicting plugins. This led me to believe that the source of fb_addgravatar would probably have additional code samples containing fb_FUNCTION_NAME.

The first Google result for fb_addgravatar was Add Avatar To WordPress Default, from a site called WPengineer.com. The author of this article was listed as “Frank,” which indicated that “fb” might be this author’s initials. I clicked on the site’s About link, and learned that one of the site’s authors is Frank Bültge, who writes about WordPress (in German) on several blogs and websites. Many of his other posts include custom functions whose names begin with fb_. And with that, the case was closed.

I’m not completely sure if I was one of the people who searched for [fb_addgravatar get_avatar], but I know I searched for several queries that were very similar to it. In any case, this should shed some light on that query for you.

P.S. I might also be responsible for searches #4, #10, #13, and #16.

P.P.S. Ok, fine…and #11.

Lisa, of all the things I needed tonight, on the eve of thanksgiving, the one thing I got that I am most grateful for, was the gift of laughing out loud.

The Lisa is teh awesome

I get “Gay National Anthem” searches on my personal site all the time (having written about Marvin Gaye).

#1 for the .org version is “how to roast a turkey”. Google conveniently tanked that search phrase for me last week, but it’s still on the first page for Yahoo & Bing.

Oddly, I’m on the first page in Bing & the first Google Image for a make and model of car that I sold back in 2005. Love that minty freshness!