Dammit Jim!

Shamus (of DM of the Rings fame) has made his own avatar generating WordPress plugin called Wavatars. They do look pretty good. I like the gradients he uses and the artwork looks pretty nice (almost as good as say monsters or geometric shapes ;) ).

He has some good ideas with automatically adding the icon to the user’s name (I had thought this would mess up the html but now that I think about it should be ok for most blogs) and gravatar support (I suppose they’ll be catching on now that they were bought by the WordPress guy) that I think I’ll implement in my plugins in the near future.

Hopefully we’ll see more automatic avatar generating plugins as they catch on.

Aziz of metaBLOG suggests that the new tags in WordPress 2.3 can be used to create a “folksonomy” on WordPress blogs. For those not in the know (including me until a couple days ago), a folksonomy is is the practice and method of collaboratively creating and managing tags to annotate and categorize content according to Wikipedia. Basically it’s letting normal people (versus say artificial intelligence or an administrator) help describe things. For example, adding a tag on flickr or using del.icio.us.

So since WordPress doesn’t currently have anything like a public “Add a Tag” and I haven’t coded a WordPress plugin recently (although I did upgrade WP_MonsterID if anyone is using it), I thought I would code up a quick plugin to see how it works. So here is WP_Folksonomy. It’s fairly basic at the moment but I’d like to get it out there to see if it’s useful and if anyone is interested in it.

Since it uses WordPress’s tagging features WP it’s only going to be compatible with WordPress 2.3 and up.