Its a service I use a lot. I can't help but wonder how the whole service works(very technical is fine with me)
Ask HN: Who does gravatar work?
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Re: Ask HN: Who does gravatar work?
#2What do you find confusing? It's owned by Wordpress guys, and people integrate it into their website. The backend stores a picture you set on the site, or one on other people's sites integrated with it. It then also keeps track of all your different accounts.
Re: Ask HN: Who does gravatar work?
#3I was an early adopter. In the beginning, there was actually a handful of us reviewing avatars and assigning ratings. Now it's just kind of left up to trust.
I don't think it was an Automattic project at first, so I doubt it's built on WordPress. But it's probably built on PHP and MySQL, with a ton of caching in front of it.
It wouldn't surprise me if it leverages WordPress.com's CDN.