Headhunter is giving Twitter avatars a permanent URL.
In the words of Remy Sharp, creator of the late Twivatar:
If you've built an app that caches a Twitter user's avatar, and that user changes their avatar, the link breaks, thus breaking your app.
Let this tiny Sinatra app do the hunting for you.
<img src="http://headhunter.heroku.com/[username]" />
Unlike Twivatar, you can't specify a size. If you feel like it, hack away and send me a patch.
If this app doesn't work as advertized, it may have exceeded the Twitter API rate limit.
(Check if the Google-O-Meter on the homepage is in the red area.)
In that case, please consider deploying your own copy on Heroku.
For a number of reasons (this list has grown since I started working on headhunter):
- It didn't work out of the box
- There is no documentation -- which is what you'd need if you face reason #1
- There are no tests -- which is what you'd need if you face reasons #1 and #2
- It uses a relational database for caching
- It uses
REPLACE, a MySQL extension to the SQL standard, which locks you in