Dammit Jim!

A couple weeks ago I made a WordPress plugin to generate unique monsters for each commenter. Don Park came up with the original idea for representing users with geometric shapes. Since I already had the framework in place I thought I’d make a WordPress plugin for the original geometric Identicons. If you want to visually represent users (but maybe you don’t like monsters so much?) then this plugin is for you.

After making the WP_MonsterID WordPress plugin to create a random monster avatar from an assortment of parts for each commenter (based on other people’s code), fruityoaty asked This looks nifty, but how many monster images are available for assigning?

I was skimming Simon Willison’s blog (I know his uncle) when I came across this cool idea for automatic avatar generation. Well to tell the truth, I took one look at the title “Visual Security: 9-block IP Identification” and deleted the link from my RSS reader but the next day a link based on that idea came up for generating a unique monster avatar for each user that did catch my interest. After all if it’s got monsters, it has got to be interesting.

I’ve ran into a weird bug in Firefox. It seems to mess up p.test:first-letter{float:left;} when there are 2 or more <div> with float:right;clear:right;. Firefox seems to put the floating first letter at the bottom of the first div which seems incorrect to my inexpert judgement. I guess it’s not too common a problem but it’s a little annoying especially since Internet Explorer seems to handle it correctly. An example of the problem should be below. This is with p.test:first-letter {color:blue; float:left; font-size:500%;} in the css file since you can’t use first-letter inline (as far as I know).