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CountCulture / twfy_local_parser

Local scraper parser to scrape and parse local authority data
http://theyworkforyoulocal.com
20 stars 1 forks source link

Gravatars for councillors #7

Closed adrianshort closed 14 years ago

adrianshort commented 14 years ago

It'd be great if you could include a Gravatar icon for each councillor on the relevant parts of the site. Not only would this improve OpenlyLocal but it'd provide a good incentive for all councillors to create a Gravatar using their official email address so they can be used elsewhere, whether on councils' own websites or those from third parties. A link to the Gravatar site beside the icon on the councillor's main page ("Update your photo at Gravatar") would be useful too.

CountCulture commented 14 years ago

Adrian I quite like the idea of using gravatars -- I've been deliberately avoiding scraping the images as this is (currently) slightly different copyright-wise from the other information on a council's website (although I tend to believe that all councillors should have to publish a public-domain photo of themselves).

How do you envisage we would find the gravatar for a councillor -- obviously if the council had this info on the councillor's page it would be easy to scrape the info?

adrianshort commented 14 years ago

There's nothing to scrape. The Gravatar image URL takes a parameter which is the MD5 hash of that person's email address. As you already have the official email addresses of many of the councillors all you need is a line of code to generate that URL. That's what makes this approach so simple and so powerful.

See how it's done here:

http://en.gravatar.com/site/implement/url

CountCulture commented 14 years ago

OK. Makes sense. All you've got to do now is get some councils to use gravatars

adrianshort commented 14 years ago

Indeed. And while the councils would be the best people to encourage councillors to use Gravatar, there's nothing to stop councillors doing it on their own initiative individually. It's not dependent on official council approval nor does it need to happen 100% across all councillors in a council.

CountCulture commented 14 years ago

The downside I guess is from the UX point of view. If it's implemented by a reasonable number of participants, the 'blank' gravatar an encouragement for others to do so. However, if it isn't it's just a distraction to the users. So really depends on whether you can get a reasonable number of councillors to do it. Time for one of your campaigns?