Fresh Click Media

The guys over at Gravatar.com have been hard at work updating their service, and I’ve updated the ASP.NET control I developed to reflect the changes.

I just got myself a freshclickmedia.com Gravatar over at gravatar.com. A Gravatar is a little avatar associated with an email address, and quite a few blogs use them to decorate post comments. Signing up is easy - all you need to do is supply an email address, and image, and give your image a content rating.

The source of the gravatar image tag points to gravatar.com’s image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the email address to prevent email harvesting. A ‘max rating’ parameter prevents the display of unsavoury content.

There are a wide number of blogging gravatar plugins, so I decided to write an ASP.NET custom control to do the job. Here I present the control and its features.

One of the strengths of ASP.NET is the ability to write your own reusable custom controls, deploy them, and use them by simply dragging them onto a form from the toolbox. This tutorial walks through the implementation of a ‘TimePicker’ custom control.

The other day, I had a niggling issue with session data. Initially, I could see no reason for my in-proc session data being lost between postbacks.