Gravatar is a global avatar service. You set your avatar on Gravatar, and it shows up on every site that uses Gravatar. Like this one. Or my Redmine instance. Or a bunch of other places.

Gravatar is also currently broken right now, the website errors whenever I try and add or delete or set an avatar. Bit annoying.

Fortunately they have an XMLRPC API, and the Perl module someone wrote for it is among the few that doesn’t point to a dead URL, so I ended up writing some (ech) Perl to set my avatar. And right now, unlike the website, the XMLRPC API is actually functioning.

Now I am an octopus, but probably not the one you’re thinking of. (You get bonus points for guessing the octopus.)

And it only took like 15 minutes more than it should’ve.