Gravatar Problems

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)

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- 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: https://millarian.com/2007/8/22/striving-for-100-percent/comments/121#comment-121
X-Runtime: 8.55324
Cache-Control: no-cache
Content-Length: 146

You are being redirected.

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

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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

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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. Thanks!

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