I knew pavatar was not connected with openID, i just always wished it was because i like the idea of hosting my own image and not having to check in with another server. the one wordpress plugin i ever found that enabled pavatar was identikit. It had some bugs though, and I am not competent enough with php to fix them. In any case, if any openid extension allows for linking to an avatar anywhere, and the consumer sites will support it, i’m on board with that.

Finally, thanks for the assistance with the widgit code. I never would have found that, and I sure never would have figured out how to do that on my own.

As for your last question, the secret lies here. It’s ugly, but it works. It will be in the next release, or you can just grab the latest comments.php from trunk.

b) I would love to see OpenID get to the point of being so ubiquitous that it is fitting for core. In the current state, I think you’re right though.

c) one thing still missing from the openid standard is avatar support. gravatar is nice because everyone uses it, but it gives a third party too much information for those of us who want to host openid on our own server. pavatar is my favorite implementation so far, but no one uses it. it would be nice to see a simple line of code added to the sreg standard with a link to an avatar. seems like that would be just as easy to check at login as it is to check for a gravatar image.

d) this is pretty unrelated, but how on earth did you manipulate the widget code so that the little openid icon in the recent posts doesn’t get mixed in with the name of the poster? if you see my blog you’ll know what i’m talking about.