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.
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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.
Once it is on your Yahoo! Profile you can then choose to have it show on your Yahoo! Answers profile.
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.
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.
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
I am already using Gravatar.. you can see it LD
I see that! Hoping to see some more as well…
You have a good Gravatar. Well i think people should you ther face pic in their Gravatar
Thank you! Smiling faces are the way to go. My last one, I looked like a grouch!
I’m going to change mine to a robot wearing 3D glasses. I think something a little unusual may catch people’s attention.
BTW, let’s see the grouchy pic again, Robert!
Guy.
Here you go… http://en.gravatar.com/userimage/1544497/4624d08309292e12599a96c35ab6de81.png
Nice! But more Sleepy than Grumpy methinks.
There we go… my new cute lil robot guy… 3DGizmo
Yup, just signed up on Gravatar. Pretty nifty 2.0 tool.
Where is your pic?
Hehe was wondering the same. Mine does not load for some reason
I want to have a cartographic picture of mine
Cartographic refers to maps…
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cartography
So I’m confused.
I’m guessing cartoon graphic.
What do you think I will use to do the job ?
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
Takes about two minutes to set up.
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…
Here is one that will make you a South Park Character: http://www.sp-studio.de/
Haven’t had an avatar in ages as it was too much of a hassle to keep it updated everywhere.
Testing my gravatar.
oh, and how can it be a hassle to keep a gravatar updated? It’s a centralized service. 0.o
John.
site is great and perfect desing!!! thanks and respect
Just got it. Gravatar is a cool tool.
If you want to build brand and have some recognition among faceless folks you need to somehow identify and distinguish yourself – gravatar is a good way to do that.
Gravatar makes your profile look more impressive and yes i am also in the process of getting one soon, just looking for the perfect one till now.