@twavatarsapi makes handling Twitter avatars easier!
May 15th, 2009. Published under Development. 1 Comment.
After attending the Twitter Developer Nest (which I recommend you attend), where I talked about FootyTweets (see my presentation here), there was a discussion about how the Twitter API handles user avatars.
The main problem is that the URL that is given in the API is a direct URL to the image. So if the user changes their image after your API call is done, you will get a broken image/404.
I have this problem with TwitterLeague and have to run a 30 minute update to check for users avatars. This also means that an avatar could be broken for up to 30 minutes. In Twitter land this is obviously a long time.
So Twavatars (twitter.com/twavatarsapi) is my solution. Whenever you want to display a users avatar instead of doing an API call you instead use a Twavatar URL, this collects the relevant users image (depending on the size) and returns an image. This means the URL can be used directly in an <img>.
This is an example URL (i am looking at getting a domain name):
http://twavatars.info/user/10721822?s=thumb
It returns this image:
I think its a nice way of handling Twitter avatars. If you want to know more please head to http://twavatars.info
Mike Branski on November 18th, 2009
This is a great little app! I came across it while searching to see if Twitter has any intention of integrating with Gravatar.