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.
