Happy December to all you hungry readers! The new month brings lots of updates at Menuism (plus the huge backlog of blog posts about them), and one of the most exciting is the ability to upload your own profile image.

How do you do it? Just go to your user homepage and look for “Change Pic” under your current picture.

What about using Gravatar, you might ask? We were initially excited about using their simple service for user avatars, but technical issues on their side have closed off the service to new users. With all the great new users joining the site, we didn’t want everyone to wait any longer, so we chose to implement our own system. Maybe one day we’ll reconsider Gravatar, but our priority is to ensure a good experience for you, our loyal users.

We just added the image feature very recently and we’ve already seen great adoption by lots of users. It just takes a minute – if you haven’t uploaded an image yet, there’s no better time than now.

-John

Service Status

Some of you may have noticed that there have been issues with the Gravatar service so people’s images haven’t been showing up properly. The service is undergoing a pretty major overhaul to accoomodate the growth and consequently the service is spotty and the new registrations and logins are currently unavailable.

What is Gravatar?

A gravatar is a 80×80 pixel image that you can use to visually represent yourself on the web. Use the same email address to create an account at www.gravatar.com. Upload a pic and once it’s approved it’ll automatically show up. You can use the same avatar image on any Gravatar-enabled website or blog. Just use the same email address and it will automatically show up. Gravatar uses MPAA-style ratings so that we can ensure only appropriate images show up on our site.

How We Use It

We cache the gravatars locally to speed up the load times since we saw that gravatar was having performance issues. The local cache is updated daily and we only use images that are rated PG or G. If you don’t have a gravatar, you’ll get the default baby Foodha image.

Where’s my Gravatar?

If you’re gravatar isn’t showing up, there’s a couple possible reasons:

• Your cached version hasn’t been updated yet – We update nightly but it only works if the Gravatar service itself is up. If it hasn’t shown up in awhile and the Gravatar service is up, send us a message and we’ll look into it.
• Your image is rated higher than G or PG – Sorry, we’re trying to keep the site somewhat family friendly. Please update your image at the Gravatar site to a tamer image.

We’ll continue to make the caching code more robust so we’re even more immune to the service issues.

Thanks for your patience.

- Justin