Test Your Website

Learn how to increase visitor action, reduce site confusion for new visitors, and get those new visitors returning back for more! Get BWI's Usability and Design Analysis.

Show Me Your Gravatar

By Robert Campbell on Thursday, January 28th, 2010 Print This Post
Previous: Did You Get Google Annotations Yet?
Next: Popular Posts and Pages on BWI for January 2010

Are you using Gravatar? I know some of the regulars to BWI are not. What is Gravatar? I’ve included a video at the bottom of this post to help explain.

A gravatar is a globally recognized avatar. Confused yet? It’s the picture of yourself when you comment on this blog. Don’t see a picture of yourself?  That is because you don’t have a gravatar.

How to Create a Gravatar

Creating a globally recognized gravatar is incredibly easy. Simply go to the Gravatar website, click on “Get your Gravatar today”, enter your email, and upload your image. DONE! You can of  course crop the image, and you can even have it match up to an alternate email address you may have. Now, when you post on a blog, any blog that supports gravatars, your image will be displayed.

How to Show Gravatars on a Website

If you run a blog, your in luck. There are several blogging software packages out there that support gravatars from the start. This site is a WordPress blog so, so I just went to Settings, then clicked on Discussion, and then scroll down the page to where you see Avatars.

Not all sites are blogs though. Fortunately, Gravatar supports websites that are not running popular CMS or blogging software. You can load gravatars using PHP, ASP, Java, Ruby, and a ton more. See Gravatar’s Implementors Guide. Easy instructions for all because there really isn’t a lot to this.

Hope to see your Gravatar on this website, and now I must figure out the rule of capitalization for gravatars. Gravatars are gravatars that are read from Gravatar’s website to display on your website.

Here is a video to help explain what Gravatar is all about.

Get usability and design tips

Like this post? Get website tips delivered by email straight to you. Full feed articles are delivered, and are managed by Google's Feedburner service.

23 Comments - Post Yours Bookmark and Share

Get a detailed anaylysis of your website: BWI's Web Usability and Design Analysis

Just Posted! Testing Your Journal

Related

Category: Code, Software Tags: , ,

23 Comments on “Show Me Your Gravatar”

  1. aromatherapy says:
    January 29, 2010 at 6:03 am

    You can go to gravatar.com and register your email and upload an image for it to show when that email is used to leave a comment.

    Reply
  2. aromatherapy says:
    January 29, 2010 at 6:03 am

    Once it is on your Yahoo! Profile you can then choose to have it show on your Yahoo! Answers profile.

    Reply
  3. Guy 3D says:
    January 29, 2010 at 8:50 am

    All the requests to the Gravatar server pulling all the images slows down page loading though, doesn’t it?

    Other than that, I like it. :)

    Guy.

    Reply
    • Robert Campbell says:
      January 29, 2010 at 9:54 am

      It does play a roll in speed a little, but each image is only about 2k max. You would really need a lot of them to be an issue.

      Reply
      • Guy 3D says:
        January 29, 2010 at 1:38 pm

        Agreed. I wasn’t concerned about bandwidth but more with the number of connections. If one image on the page doesn’t have height and width attributes, the browser will wait for all images to be downloaded before showing the page… well, they used to, at least. If one page requests 50 Gravatar images, the number of connections could slow down load time.

        I remember the days of “crushing gifs” to speed up webpage load times, so perhaps it’s my old age showing. :p

        Guy

        Reply
  4. MMA Pound for Pound says:
    January 29, 2010 at 11:31 am

    I am already using Gravatar.. you can see it LD

    Reply
  5. vitamins says:
    January 31, 2010 at 3:38 pm

    Yup, just signed up on Gravatar. Pretty nifty 2.0 tool.

    Reply
  6. rocreh says:
    February 1, 2010 at 6:31 pm

    I want to have a cartographic picture of mine

    Reply
  7. rocreh says:
    February 1, 2010 at 6:32 pm

    What do you think I will use to do the job ?

    Reply
  8. used tires says:
    February 2, 2010 at 10:29 pm

    Thanks, I’m going to look into this. Haven’t had an avatar in ages as it was too much of a hassle to keep it updated everywhere.

    Till then,

    Jean

    Reply
  9. aromatherapy says:
    February 4, 2010 at 1:52 am

    i always wanted to make my gravatar my avatar,you know a gravatar is a image instead of one of those silly cartoons how do i do that…

    Reply

Leave a Comment

Subscribe without commenting

Return to top of page