A Gravatar Image and a Sidebar

Having defined a basic user page in the previous section, we’ll now flesh it out a little with a profile image for each user and the first cut of the user sidebar. When making views, we’ll focus on the visual appearance and not worry too much about the exact structure of the page, which means that (at least for now) we won’t be writing tests. When we come to more error-prone aspects of view, such as pagination (Section 9.3.3), we’ll resume test-driven development.

We’ll start by adding a ‘‘globally recognized avatar,’’ or Gravatar, to the user profile.7 Originally created by Tom Preston-Werner (cofounder of GitHub) and later acquired by Automattic (the makers of WordPress), Gravatar is a free service that allows users to upload images and associate them with email addresses they control. Gravatars are a convenient way to include user profile images without going through the trouble of managing image upload, cropping, and storage; all we need to do is construct the proper Gravatar image URI using the user’s email address and the corresponding Gravatar image will automatically appear.8

         Our plan is to define a gravatar_for helper function to return a Gravatar image for a given user, as shown in Listing 7.12.

You can verify at this point that the test suite is failing:

Because the gravatar_for method is undefined, the user show view is currently broken. (Catching errors of this nature is perhaps the most useful aspect of view specs. This is why having some test of the view, even a minimalist one, is so important.)

By default, methods defined in any helper file are automatically available in any view, but for convenience we’ll put the gravatar_for method in the file for helpers associated with the Users controller. As noted at the Gravatar home page, Gravatar URIs are based on an MD5 hash of the user’s email address. In Ruby, the MD5 hashing algorithm is implemented using the hexdigest method, which is part of the Digest library:

Since email addresses are case-insensitive (Section 6.2.4) but MD5 hashes are not, we’ve used the downcase method to ensure that the argument to hexdigest is all lower-case. The resulting gravatar_for helper appears in Listing 7.13.