The Quest for your Avatars

It might seem like a trivial thing, but it’s taken me this long. Hey, in my defense, I asked around, even got guidance from some OGs, but the implementation I had fell under the category of “meh.”

Your avatar link is broken.

Since we’ve been around for a while now—9 years going on 10—there are users here (me included) who haven’t updated their avatar in forever. As a matter of fact, I don’t even look like my avatar anymore, but I’m too attached to the darn thing.

There’s an element of branding, I get it. But this hard-headedness we have, this resistance to updating our avatar images, has given this particular ecosystem a very peculiar problem.

How would I put it?

I guess the easiest way to explain it is this: sometimes servers stop existing. Sometimes the image you uploaded on Discord 8 years ago to use as your profile picture has “expired.” And yet… an image still has to be displayed.

My quest began very innocently:

How do I pull up the avatar image?

I looked into the docs, did some searches, found some sample code, asked my little GPT buddy what he thought—and all of a sudden things began to work. Wait… what? Work? No, that’s not the right word. The code did a thing.

Sometimes an avatar would show. Sometimes it would not. Sometimes it would show a picture of an avatar that was not “the right one” either.

Fun fact I’ll share: I know how some of you look.

While attempting to troubleshoot this avatar fiasco, I began copy-pasting URLs into my browser. What is this? Who is this? The metadata says two things? Which one is it?

Most of the time I would find avatars, creatures, teddy bears, anime characters—that sort of thing. But sometimes I would find a real picture. Someone’s humble beginnings, back when anonymity wasn’t being considered. I won’t share specifics (for obvious reasons), but some of you should check. That’s all I’ll say.

I found the cheat codes.

That’s probably the only way to put it. Funnily enough, I don’t even know how I found it. Yes, I asked an AI for an idea, and this time around it spat out a link. Vat is das? I thought to muhself.

Behold, ze trick:

👉 https://images.hive.blog/u/username/avatar/original

This linky link, for some reason—don’t ask me why—always returns “the correct” avatar. Yes, even if you are @wiseagent and the image you used for your avatar stopped existing on the server three years ago.

So today…

Instead of just being bitter about Apple being complicated with the store submission (my brother @joseamenac has a lot to say about this), I decided to spend the day unifying the logic. Making the whole app work out of the same linky link. And you know what? It works beautifully.

I suspect someone is going to show up in my comments at some point and tell me this linky link is old news, and that all serious devs use the linky link. To that I have to say:

Does that mean I’m a dev now?

hahahaha

MenO