Implementing Gravatar’s into your website really adds a nice flavor to it. It adds personality to your comments and helps create a feeling of community. In fact, millions of avatar images are served billions of times per day (29,015 requests per second!) via Gravatar.
As a web user, it’s nice to have a personalized avatar appear and update automatically on blogs you make comments at. Much like a profile picture on Facebook or avatar on Twitter. Many sites use Gravatar for their built-in avatar system, and getting an avatar through Gravatar is completely free and easy to setup.
Here are a few cool ways to implement Gravatar into your website:
Display Your Gravatar Image as Your WordPress Website Favicon
This is cool and easy to add to your WordPress site.
By adding this snippet to your functions.php or dropping this into your own functionality plugin, your sites favicon will display your Gravatar avatar image.
[cc lang=”php”]function gravatar_favicon() {
$GetTheHash = md5(strtolower(trim(get_bloginfo(‘admin_email’))));
return ‘http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/’ . $GetTheHash . ‘?s=16’;
}
function favicon() {
echo ‘‘;
}
add_action(‘wp_head’, ‘favicon’);[/cc]
After you drop this in, go into your settings menu in WordPress and update the default admin_email, and you’re all set!
Gravatar Reminder WordPress Plugin
So your WordPress blog supports Gravatar, either via your WordPress theme or JetPack WordPress Plugin, what can you do about all of those commenters that display, the “Mystery Man”?
Use TentBlogger‘s Simple Gravatar Reminder WordPress Plugin.
It adds this just below the comment submission button:
This can be very useful as you build an online community around your blog. It’s a great way to encourage people to put a face to their name!
Sign-Up
Like a said at the start, Gravatar is completely free and easy to use. By updating your photo on Gravatar, your avatar is instantly updated on every blog post comment you’ve made on websites supporting the Gravatar system.
Very cool.
If you have more than one email address you use when leaving comments, you can associate multiple email addresses with the same avatar. Plus, you can drop in some profile info.
Want to switch back to a previous avatar? No problem. Gravatar will keep your previously uploaded images, and you can use different images for different email addresses if you like, all under one account.
Get your avatar from Gravatar!
If you’re not running WordPress or are interested in more functionality, be sure to check-out Gravatar’s Developer Resources.
OI says
I agree with you.
I like Gravatar.
The only thing I don’t get is why you can’t delete an account when you don’t need it.
Eric Dye says
Good question.