Gravatar Support Installed And Enabled

For those of you that don’t know, Gravatars are “Globally Recognizable Avatars”. To get an account at the site and to learn more from them you can visit their site. When you set up an account you give them your email address that you then pair up with a relatively small image to use as you avatar. Then, on weblogs and other discussion sites with Gravatar enabled that image will appear beside you entry/ comment. Every site asks for your email, and that’s all the Gravatar database needs to return your avatar to the site you commented on. The owner/ administrator of that site has to install and enable the support so Gravatars can be utilized on their site. This page has the needed downloads and directions on how to implement Gravatars on your weblog. For WordPress the implementation comes as a plugin for enabling and disabling the support, and a “Gravatar” folder to place into the “wp-content” folder that includes the cache and the global Gravatar image if none exits for the entered email. I then had to add a single line of code into the “comments.php” file to actually display the Gravatars in the comments if the support is enabled with the plugin.

So what does all this mean to the reader? From now on when you post a comment to my weblog it will test the email you enter alongside the Gravatar database and grab your avatar if one is on record, if one isn’t it will attach the local substitute avatar. Also, the weblog will cache the avatar to make it easier to grab the avatar again the next time you comment on my weblog.

By doing this I hope to make it easier across weblogs and discussion forums to know who is posting what. In my case, my Gravatar is the same as my avatar in various forums (like Apple’s).

Having an account is free so if you want, I suggest that you set one up for yourself. Also, if your going to set an account up for yourself don’t comment here until you do to be sure that my weblog caches your Gravatar and not the substitute Gravatar alongside your email address.

Enjoy, Alex.