Profile Pictures

Inspired by Kieran Klukas, here's a timeline of as many of my profile pictures as I can still find and conclusively identify as having-been-used:

2026

For the first time in a couple of decades I've begun using a "drawn" avatar again - the "danaboos" which are found throughout this site. The "peekaboo" one is the most-widely-used, I think:

(Did you know that you can use the Dress-Up menu to change the hair and t-shirt colour for the "danaboos", by the way?)

The one of me using a laptop is probably next most-frequently-used:

I ended up sketching plenty more "danaboos" and hiding them about the place, too.

2016

From around 2016 I began using crops from this photo, originally taken of me in 2013 for a newspaper article about my website FreeDeedPoll.org.uk. It was taken alongside a wall of names near my office at the time, which the photographer thought was fitting:

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Dan, in a grey jumper, stands next to a stone plaque covered in names.

I occasionally used a few other shots from the same session, such as this one from near the side door of the Sheldonian Theatre:

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Dan, aged in his 30s, looks up at the sky outside a large wooden door.

And this one, which is kind-of fun with its "Q is for..." (which was actually a part of the hoarding outside the New Bodleian during its reconstruction into the Weston Library):

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Dan points above his head to a large letter 'Q'.

2011

This photo was taken by the official photographer at Ruth & JTA's wedding on 27 November 2010. There were so many good photos taken that day, and I'm not even confident that this was the best one of me, but it became part of my default profile picture for a long time.

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Dan, aged around 30, wearing a suit, waistcoat, buttonhole and cravat, holds a small glass in a traditionally but attractively-decorated hotel.

2007

In April 2007 my friend Ele took this photo of me hanging out with friends under Constitution Hill on North Beach, Aberystwyth, and I used it as my profile picture in many places for years to come.

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Dan, in his mid-20s, lit by bright sunlight on a rocky beach, smiles at the camera.

2006

Prior to the above, I was sometimes seen using this one online. I'm not sure why I'm wearing a suit in it. Possibly I'd just been to a murder mystery party?

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Dan, in his mid-20s, wearing a dark grey suit and light grey shirt.

2005

In 2005 I reused graphics from the first generation of my short-lived-and-mostly-lost webcomic Dan & Alex to make a pair of animated GIFs that each "told a story" in a sufficiently long and drawn-out way that people who don't have the wherewithal to fast-forward GIFs would get trapped into watching the whole thing:

2000

For a long while from around 2000, I mostly used in place of a profile photo an MS-Paintbrush-grade doodle of a smiling face with long hair. I enjoyed that I could sketch it on paper just as well as onto a screen:

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Black-on-white line drawing of a basic head shape with eyes, nose, and smiling mouth, with long hair down each side.

1999

A photo somebody snapped of me (on film, no less) while I was at college, and that I later scanned and used on my website at the time:

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Dan, aged around 18.

I used this one online at around the same time; it's cropped from a photograph I took on timer-mode showing me and the rest of my Computing class, circa May 1998:

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Low-resolution crop showing Dan, aged around 17, laughing and pointing at the camera.

1998

In 1998 my website hosted a couple of pictures originally taken on a Sony MVC-FD5 digital camera around 1997-1998. I've managed to retrieve the originals rather than the downscaled web versions (but they're still pretty low-res):

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Dan, aged around 16/17, sits in front of a radiator, facing the camera.

You can see the camera itself in this "mirror selfie" from the same time (taken, presumably, shortly after a re-bleaching of my hair!):

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Dan, with exceptionally-blonde hair, holds a large square digital camera.