Diligence is still under development and incomplete, and some this documentation is wrong. For a more comprehensive but experimental version download the Savory Framework, which was the preview release of Diligence.
Gravatar Integration
Gravatar is a popular service for managing user avatars and simple profile pages by associating them with email addresses.
It makes users happy, because they can manage their avatars for many, many services in one place. The user's email is hashed so that it is not made publicly available, unless the user chooses to put them explicitly on their profile.
It makes site owners happy, because they can display avatars for users without having to store them or otherwise manage them. Additionally, new users would have their avatar immediately displayed without any effort on their part, and users do not like effort. If you're using the authentication service in association with the registration feature, then you already have an email address for the user, and can immediately fetch their avatar from Gravatar.
Worried about forcing users to use an external service? Then make Gravatar an optional fallback. Provide users with a way to manage avatars on your site directly, and only default to Gravatar.
Usage
Make sure to check out the API documentation for Diligence.Gravatar.
Just enter an email address, and let the Diligence magic happen.
The avatar above is hyperlinked to their Gravatar profile page. And here's the complete JSON dump of their profile:
The Diligence Manual is provided for you under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. The complete manual is available for download as a PDF.
