Tom Werner

Thomas Charles "Tom" Werner (born April 12, 1950) is an American television producer, screenwriter, director, and businessman. Via his investment in Fenway Sports Group (originally New England Sports Ventures), Tom serves as chairman of the Boston Red Sox and Liverpool Football Club.

Early life

Werner was born to a Jewish family, in New York City, New York. He was educated at St. Bernard's School in Manhattan, The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Connecticut, and earned an English degree from Harvard University.

Television career

In 1973, Werner entered television by working for ABC-TV. In 1975, he became the Director of East Coast Prime Time Development. Werner was promoted to senior vice president of the prime-time development department in 1979. While at ABC, Werner and his partner Marcy Carsey saw Robin Williams in a comedy club and launched Mork & Mindy. Werner also oversaw the development of Bosom Buddies which started the career of Tom Hanks, as well as Soap which started the career of Billy Crystal and Taxi which started the career of Danny DeVito.

Gravatar

Gravatar (a portmanteau of globally recognized avatar) is a service for providing globally unique avatars which was created by Tom Preston-Werner. Since 2007, it has been owned by Automattic, who have integrated it into their WordPress.com blogging platform.

Designs

On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account. Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an email address, the blogging software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment. Gravatar support is provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5 and in web based project management application Redmine beginning with version 0.8. Support for Gravatars is also provided via third-party modules for web content management systems such as Drupal and MODx.

A Gravatar avatar can be up to 2048 pixels wide, is always square and is displayed at 80 by 80 pixels by default. If the uploaded avatar is larger or smaller, the avatar is scaled appropriately. Each Gravatar is rated with an MPAA-style age recommendation, which allows webmasters to control the content of the Gravatars displayed on their website.