Pavatar

The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user. An example would be if you made a comment or a site posting where an avatar is required. This way, delivering your Personal Avatar is peripheral and can be (nearly) anonymous. This option inhibits companies from collecting personal information about your habits on the web.

Why should I use Pavatar?

Many of you noticed that the Gravatar.com service is offline quite a lot. Pavatars are a great and open alternative which makes you independent of a central and not working server because you host all Pavatars yourself.

Pavatars have all advantages of Favatars, but are bigger and you can use different Pavatars on one domain.

Because everyone hosts his/her own Pavatar on his/her own page, there is no need to sign in on external pages and wait for a activation.

How to add a Pavatar?

A Pavatar must be a 80x80 px in either PNG, JPG or GIF format.

If you want to be recognized, you have to set up your homepage so it's Pavatar ready. This is not a big problem and there are multiple ways to do it:

  1. For geeks: add the X-Pavatar: http://example.com/path/my-pavatar.png header to your homepage.
  2. For webmasters: add this tag to your HTML:
    <link rel="pavatar" href="http://example.com/path/my-pavatar.png" />
  3. For others: Upload your Pavatar with the name pavatar.png to your homepage.

There is a documentation how to publicizing your Pavatar on your Blogger blog or your Xanga blog.

If you need help

The new Pavatar Support Forum has opened right now. Ask and answer questions round around Pavatar.

We absolutely need much more plugins and other implementations of Pavatar, so if you are a developer write a Pavatar plugin for your favourite software. The forum is a great place to ask if you have questions how to do that.

Check your Pavatar!

If you want to check your Pavatar to make sure it is working right, try the »Check your Pavatar!« script.

Specifications

Check out the specifications for the Candidate Recommendation!

This is the 18 December 2006 Candidate Recommendation of the Personal Avatar. This Candidate Recommendation was published to indicate that the document is believed to be stable and to encourage implementation by the developer community.

Comments are welcome, please write to: spec@pavatar.com

Check out some code

If you want to take a look at how the code is written: