How To Create an Animated Meetup Avatar

This tutorial was originally poster the Meetup Organizer's forum here.

Hey Everyone,

I think this is going to be the first tutorial of a series of how to extend the Meetup boards - How To Create an Animated Meetup Avatar.

It's the called the animated avatar. An example of an animated Meetup avatar is my own avatar. It is made up of 3 images that are sequenced and timed to give the illusion of movement. For any animators out there, the term persistence of vision may ring a bell.

It seems that Meetup will only allow a .jpg file to be uploaded to serve as an avatar. This meant that if you wanted an animated avatar, it would not work because the upload will only allow a jpg and not a gif file (at the time of this writing).

So how to make an animated avatar. It's actually pretty simple to make one. Here's what you do:

1. Create you animated avatar. You can use all kinds of programs for this, I won't get into it tho.

You can find a ton of gif animators here:
http://www.google.com...

If that Google search doesn't do it for you, then add another attribute to the search such as "free gif animator for mac" and etc.

2. After you've made your avatar and you are happy with it, save it as a .gif. Now at the directory level of our computer, go the same animated .gif file (make a backup ok?), and then reassign the extension .gif to .jpg.

That's it! You file is now ready.

Upload it to your Meetup and then see it do its thing.

James Tadeo Web Designer and Programmer