Gravatars

Last night there was a question about Gravatars. At one point, jc wrote us the whole process of getting a Gravatar, getting it rated, and so forth, and we had a link to that comment in the sidebar. But at some point the link was no longer valid, so now there's just a link to the main page of the Gravatar web site.

What is a gravatar?

A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an 80 x 80 pixel avatar image that follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on weblogs?

How do I get a gravatar?

Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that's required is your email address. Once you've signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you'll start seeing it on gravatar enabled weblogs!

You can register with more than one e-mail address, and change Gravatars simply by plugging a different address into the e-mail field when you are commenting. Some people only register one e-mail address with Gravatar, and then change Gravatars by logging in to the official web site, where they see a screen with something like this:

If I wanted to change my Gravatar to something other than that sweet puppy face, I could use that interface to upload a new image from my computer. The puppy would continue to display with that e-mail address until the person at the Gravatar got around to giving the new image a rating, and then the new image would appear. How long that will take is hard to say.

However, the the Haloscan control panel (that place I'm always logging into to undo the work of the gremlins that duplicate some of our posts), I can set an image as a default Gravatar, and it will display immediately.

Last November, I took advantage of that feature and made "Birthday Flat Howard" the default Gravatar, so anyone who didn't already have a registered Gravatar got that image as the default. Then I did a Thanksgiving Howard, a Winter Holiday Howard, and so on until I picked the Dean 2008 Gravatar around Presidents' Day. And that one just sort of stuck, I guess because I forgot about doing seasonal Gravatars. Which is probably a good thing, because, did we really want to see Howard Dean with Easter bunny ears? ;-)

Anyway, LeslieK's question reminded me that I'd been meaning to change the default Gravatar, so now we have this:

"Arrrrgh, George Bush, ye scruvy dog! Ye'd best be givin' us the people their civil liberties back!"

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