Gravatar Problems

August 25th, 2007

When I switched the blog to Mephisto I had installed the Gravatar caching plugin. It seemed to be working fine prior to deployment, but once in production it was not working as expected. Today I finally tried to track down what was wrong. hopefully this will fix any problems with Gravatar images, creating comments, etc. I won’t be so bold as to say this will work for everyone, but it works for me :)

My first problem was that Gravatar images were not displaying at all, even when the email address had an associated Gravatar and the plugin had cached the file. I could navigate to the image directly and see it was correct, but the plugin was not finding it. After some debugging, I noticed the file exists check was using a relative path. By changing this to an absolute path I was able to see images. Woohoo!

lib/mephisto_gravatar_cache.rb (line 14)

- if File.exists?("#{GravatarAPI.cache_dir}#{md5_email}.gif")
+ if File.exists?(File.expand_path("../#{GravatarAPI.cache_dir}#{md5_email}.gif"))

Next up was an annoying error message that was appearing whenever someone posted a comment. It looked something like this:

Cache Gravatar for => somebody@gmail.com
=> gravatar NOT FOUND at www.gravatar.com
Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8
Status: 302 Found
Location: http://millarian.com/2007/8/22/striving-for-100-percent/comments/121#comment-121
X-Runtime: 8.55324
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Length: 146

<html><body>You are being <a href="http://millarian.com/2007/8/22/striving-for-100-percent/comments/121#comment-121">redirected</a>.</body></html>

Same thing happened even when a Gravatar image was found… Nobody was safe from this problem. I did a search in the source for where “gravatar NOT FOUND” was being output. This message was being logged and put to the console, so I simply wrapped it in a conditional to output the results only in development mode, like so:

lib/gravatar_api.rb

def self.explain(msg)
  # create a new logger if it doesnt already exist
+ if ENV['RAILS_ENV'] == 'development'
    log.info(msg)
    puts(msg)
+ end
end

This seemed to solve that problem.

While I was exploring the Gravatar cache plugin I also rewrote the cache_gravatars rake task to be a little more efficient and, since I exclude the explain for production, to output a listing of what’s happening.

tasks/mephisto_gravatar_cache_tasks.rake

desc "WGET all gravatars for all email addresses in contents table (comments). Call with RAILS_ENV=production (else defaults to development env)" 
task :cache_gravatars => :environment do |t|

  # get all the comments that have an email address
  ActiveRecord::Base.establish_connection(RAILS_ENV.to_sym)
- comments = (Comment.find :all).collect {|c| c if c.author_email?}.compact
+ comments = Comment.find(:all, :select => "author_email", :conditions => "author_email IS NOT NULL AND author_email != ''", :group => "author_email")

+ puts "Caching Gravatars for:" 

  # try caching a gravatar for each comment
  comments.each do |comment|
+   puts " - #{comment.author_email}" 
    GravatarAPI.cache_gravatar comment.author_email

    # be nice to gravatar.com, wait a second before next request
    sleep(1)
  end
end

Please let me know of any other oddities using the information in about. Thanks!

Posted by curtis Filed in Blog, Ruby on Rails, Software

3 Responses to “Gravatar Problems”

Matt
September 3rd, 2007
03:32 AM

Hi,

Thanks for taking the time to debug and try out the plugin. It was my first attempt at a rails plugin and I coded it sometime ago (rather hastily I might add) – I will be sure to try out your fixes and update the repository. I need to write some tests for it too ..

Thanks again !

Matt
cglee
December 3rd, 2007
10:48 PM

Did you run into any Mephisto caching issues as far as seeing the Gravatar being displayed?
Curtis
December 6th, 2007
08:54 PM

cglee, I have not run across any Mephisto caching issues with Gravatar. I must admit that after I got it working I haven’t really paid a lot of attention to it.

Millarian