A gravatar is a small avatar image that appears beside your name when you comment on blogs. It uses your email address to associate your unique icon with your comment. Cool right?
All you do is sign up for a free Gravatar account and upload your graphic. Then, anywhere you leave (or already left) a comment, you’ll see your image!
Of course, it only works on Gravatar enabled sites. And The Twaddle is enabled! Hurray!
Tech Stuff
This information is for those who want to enable this on their own blogs.
Update – Gravatar capability is built into Wordpress 2.7+ making these steps unnecessary.
I went through a bit of trial and error when I first installed Gravatar on this blog. So, I’m going to give a quick tutorial for anyone who wants to install this on their blog too.
First I went to the Gravatar site for Word Press and downloaded the plugin. I followed the installation instructions. Then I went into my themes folder, found the comments.php file and stuck this code
<img src="<?php gravatar("R", 40); ?>" alt="" />
next to the commenter’s name div. I messed around with inserting this code in the right spot until the gravatar rested neatly at the left. That’s it!
Hey, I don't want this picture. What gives?
10 Comments
I had my gravatar enabled today. cool~
Cool! I like the cartoon-look. I should find a cartoon that looks like me. Awesome. I love web stuff!
I got my cartoon avatar created here!
See this?!? I have one too
Also, if you want an easy way to get users to sign up for a Gravatar, install Tempus Fugit’s Gravatar Signup WordPress plugin. This plugin will add a checkbox to your comment area.
Comment Update: This plugin doesn’t work for me anymore.
When a user checks the box, they’re automatically signed up for a free Gravatar! They’ll get an email notice (as long as they provided a real email address in the comment form).
See it in use! Look in the comment section below!
I can’t get mine to work.
OK, I got it now. Plus, I added this function to my site. This DOES make blogging fun!
Yes! Congrats Mike! I checked out your blog the other day – very nice. I’ll need to spend a little more time checking out the whole thing.
Your site is cool and even though this post is old, I was looking around at troubleshooting this gravatar plugin since I have a gravatar but for some reason a lot of my visitors don’t. I wanted to make it easy, but it’s not working when I followed all the instructions a million times so I’ll put it off again — LOL!! Nice blog tho! (But the check box you mentioned isn’t showing up in this form either, hmm…)
xo/Evie
Evie,
Thanks for commenting! I removed that plugin with the gravatar checkbox because it added too much code which slowed my page loading time. The only thing I do now to encourage gravatar sign-up is the small text-widget that I made in the sidebar.
Also, I think our visitors just don’t care about gravatars. They don’t think they’re as cool as we think they are!
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