When we moved this blog to a new IP address (so we host all our blogs on the same Wordpress installation) we also added Gravatars. If you post a comment in this blog and got a Gravatar you’ll see your avatar next to your comment (otherwise you’ll see the standard Gravatar).

Gravatars are globally recognized avatars connected to your email address. Whenever you post or comment on a site using the free Gravatar plugin you will see your avatar. This way you only have to upload your avatar once. It’s reminding me of OpenID since you only have to register once

Blog owners

Gravatars make if possible for your visitors to have their avatar next to their comment making comments more personal. Gravatars are really easy to install. Just download the plugin from the gravatar web site and use it. They got instructions for how to install Gravatars on must blog platforms (even a Blogger hack ).

If you like us are using Wordpress you can set a default gravatar in case the user hasn’t uploaded an avatar yet. So far you have to survive with the standard Gravatar avatar since we haven’t designed a default gravatar for our users just yet.

Visitors and people posting comments

Now you only have to register your email address and upload your avatar once to have your avatar next to posts in any blog anywhere as long as they’re Gravatar enabled. Post a comment in this post to try it. If you have registered and uploaded your avatar at gravatar.com you will see it next to your comment . If not point your web browser to www.gravatar.com and register. It’s free and the registration is really easy.

If you want to have multiple gravatars, you simply just register more then one email address on your account and you can have for example one “sad” avatar, one “happy” avatar and one “angry” avatar. This way you can show the readers your mod when you posted. Or you can register one avatar for each one of your sites depending on which site or blog you wish to promote by posting a comment.

At the moment Gravatars have been activated on this blog, Entrecard contests and Finding Public Information. As soon as we’ve tested the plugin we will activate it on all our blogs (same as for OpenID). Let us know if you like Gravatars or not.

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This entry was posted on Monday, April 21st, 2008 at 6:27 am and is filed under Blogging, HTML & The Web. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.