I'm working on a project right now where I needed a quick and easy way to generate avatars.
I stumbled on this gravatar like service and wanted to share it with anyone who's thinking about how to go about avatar generation themselves.

It's called 8bit avatar and it makes for some fun graphics.

It works on the same principle as gravatar.
A string is used for input, it's hashed to md5, the md5 is then used as an input feed to a bit map which then has some rules based transforms applied.

For instance here's me...(I used to look like that in the 80's)

@ned

@dan

@stan

@smooth

@alechahn

It does girls too!

*For instance here's...
@stellabelle

@casandrarose

@beanz

@badassbarbie (in case she ever remembers how to login again)

To use this you create an img tag and use the src attribute of
http://eightbitavatar.herokuapp.com/?id=yourname&s=male/female
Make sure you don't use the @ sign in front of the name and please be sure to pick one of either male or female.
Also keep in mind that it's case sensitive, so if you're not satisfied with the way it comes out at first, feel free to play with it until you get something better.

For instance, this is how I look now days

<img src="http://eightbitavatar.herokuapp.com/?id=WilliamBanks&s=male&size=400">

There's also an npm package available and it works with browserify
https://www.npmjs.com/package/avatar-generator

Anyways, I thought I would bring it to your attention and I hope you enjoy it! Have fun!

Update: *I've opened an issue up on github to see if they'll add it as a feature to the site
In the meantime if you want to fake it...

You could just use inline styling for now!

# ![]("http://eightbitavatar.herokuapp.com/?id=WilliamBanks&s=male&size=100") You could just use inline styling for now! 

https://github.com/adam-p/markdown-here/wiki/Markdown-Cheatsheet#images