How to Show Off your XBox 360 Avatar

Ok, here's a fun post. If you want to show you XBox 360 avatar, and/or game cred, on your web site, you can take one of four approaches:

1. Gamer Card

   This is the traditional gamer card.
   
   



2. Gamer Card NXE

   This is the new gamer card, with the New XBox Experience avatar.
   
   



3. Head

   This is empty for my profile, for some reason.
   
   



4. Full

   And this is my self-designed avatar. It's slimmer than me (he must be hitting gym while I'm on the road ) but I really like his glasses and general attitude:
   

To get any of them on your site, simply "view source" on this post, search for the words in the header (like "NXE") and copy the HTML of the method you like, replacing my gamer tag with yours.

OK, so now you know my gamer tag and the way I look (or wish I looked ). Feel free to challenge me on XBox Live.

How to NOT Get Your Dynamic IP

Something funny I just saw and had to share:
A long while ago, I had a post about getting a static IP (read Get Yourself a Static IP). Apparently, one creative commenter on Gizmodo found a lazier way to get his IP:

I use DropBox [www.getdropbox.com] and set up a little script that calls whatismyip.org and writes the result to a text file. This is done once an hour. DropBox syncs to my work machine with that text file. That way a static ip isn't needed.

It's ghetto, but it works. :)

Now, I use DropBox myself and highly recommend it (although Microsoft's Mesh surpasses it in OS integration, it does install quite a lot, and requires certain service packs on Windows and Leopard on the Mac). So I thought I may give this method a try. I went to whatsmyip.org, and underneath my IP, I found the following:

PLEASE do not use automated software or scripts to load this site
This site is for Humans, smart Primates & Dolphins only (oh and aliens)

Fair enough, I thought, but still went ahead and selected "view source" to see if the IP is parse-able. And then I found this comment:

###########################

Seriously. Please don't program a bot to use
this site to get a user's IPs. It kills my server
and thats not nice.
Just get some cheap or free web hosting and
make your own IP only page to power your bot.
Then you won't even have to parse any html,
just load the IP directly - better for everyone!!
      
###########################

Gotcha man. You're absolutely right. There are better ways to get my dynamic IP, than mooching off of your bandwidth. I guess that Gizmodo commenter just ignored this big, green comment.