[wavephorm]

Yeah so instead of having a controller and a view, you have a controller and a separate formatter class which looks like this:

  module ViewHelpers
   def gravatar
    gravatar_id = Digest::MD5.hexdigest(self[:email].to_s.strip.downcase)
    gravatar_for_id(gravatar_id)
   end

   def gravatar_for_id(gid, size = 30)
    "#{gravatar_host}/avatar/#{gid}?s=#{size}"
   end

   def gravatar_host
    @ssl ? 'https://secure.gravatar.com' : 'http://www.gravatar.com'
   end
  end

I argue this will get extremely tiresome for large websites.

[ryansking]

Works pretty well for us (twitter.com).