Add gravatar to your ASP site

So ... lets start at the top.... .What is gravatar? From their website http://www.gravatar.com/, I got the following explanation

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80�80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

Think of gravatar.com as a dictionary that associates email addresses and avatar images. When you leave a comment on a weblog and provide your email address, the weblog can use your email address to look up your avatar. Since the dictionary is available to anyone, a single avatar image can represent you across many different weblogs.

Now also from their site, in the FAQ section, they state that you will need to send them the email address of the user to receive their Gravatar image. Which poses a serious problem: How do you do that, without getting people spammed senseless? The answer was simple enough. Use a one way hash (in their case MD5) to generate the equivalent of the Email address.

Now I don't want to get into the nitty gritty details of MD5 (you can read it at the IETF website here) but it provides "good enough" uniqueness for hashes generated with it. It's also one way, so there is no [easy] way to get the email back

To construct your img tag, you will need to format the request as follows:

First send the request to: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php? with the email hash to follow in the format: Gravatar_ID=(Email Hash). An optional Rating can be added to make sure you don't end up with XXX gravatars on your family-only site. Therefore, the optional rating=.

Additional options: Default, Size, & border. Some additional conveniences to allow you to customize it to your liking.

Now the million dollar question...The MD5 hash is a bit complex to generate, so How can I do it?

I started to write my own implementation when I stumbled over a very nice little implementation that is available in VBS and Javascript. All you need to do is include it in your ASP and you get a nice MD5 hash, you can get it here http://www.frez.co.uk/freecode.htm#md5 (I have also copied it to my server in case that site is no longer available, you can get it here: http://blog.sweetestmemories.com/media/md5.zip

So in your ASP just add [--!#include virtual="md5"--] and in your code just use the function MD5() to return the MD5 hash of the email (example: [img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?GravatarID=[%=md5(username%]....etc) (remember to change [ and ] and swap them with < and > respectively

And that's boys and girls how you can have it on your ASP site, Enjoy