I recently installed Gravatar here on the Laughing Squid blog. Gravatars are those cool avatars you see next to people’s comments. They help you maintain a consistent identity across blogs by providing a global avatar. They are really simple to setup and use. Just sign-up for a free Gravatar account, then when you leave a comment on a Gravatar enabled blog your Gravatar will automatically be associated with your email address and be displayed. Go ahead, try it out out on this post by leaving a comment here after you’ve setup your Gravatar.
Adding Gravatars to your blog is really easy as well. There are plugins available for several blogging platforms. Check out the Gravatar implementor’s guide for more info.
Back in October 2007 Gravatar was acquired by Automattic (WordPress’ parent company), which has greatly improved performance and will help Gravatar scale as it grows. Gravatar will eventually be worked into wordpress.com as well.
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{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Let’s see how this works. =]
So glad I set up Gravatars myself all of THREE DAYS ago. Coincidence? I think so.
I forgot I had a Gravatar until recently when I posted a comment here and my ugly mug popped up next to it. It’s kind of unnerving at first. “How do they know what I look like?!”
Hi Scott,
Why not a Pavatar?
I just discovered them and they seem far more decentralized than Gravatars (though the latter is easier to set up, no doubt). Actually, I only set one up for myself because it came built-in with PHP OpenID. I do like their approach, though :)
Aral, it’s pretty simple, I’ve never heard of Pavatar, that’s why. Also, why not Gravatar? Works pretty well as far as I can tell.
This post was not intended to be a comparison of avatar services (I’ll leave that to the 1000 other blogs that write about that), but more of an to let people know that I’ve installed Gravatar on this blog, explain what it is and show people how to use it.
how does this look?
sorry, one more time. assuming that entering my email will ping Gravatar. (just signed up 10 minutes ago).
intriguing.
okay, im now just using your blog to experiment. this should work.
Nice addition to the blog! There also should be some new features and functionality coming to Gravatar soon.
I set up a Gravatar some months ago, but couldn’t figure out exactly how it was supposed to be used. Now I know.
OK, I’ve signed up… now how does this work?
I loves me the Gravatar. I have added it to my upcoming site (running Joomla!) using jomcomment. I used to use it on my Wordpress site as well. I too, am probably going to have to do a little post about how it works. Glad you added it Scott.
let´s see if this really works..
Ooh! Neat! Gravatars.
Interesting concept. Their site could use a little more documentation tho. Let’s see if I did it right.
Heh. BTW, the name reminds me of the old arcade game…
This is a beautiful idea, if it works correctly. By the way, this post is a brilliant way to invite comments and to get people reading to contribute.
Mine hasn’t been working ad I’m not sure what I’m doing wrong.
Testing!
I tried but no way to use Gravatar on my website :(
Test :(
This is a test
this is second test
Test…
Neat idea.
Just testing this out.