How to spice up your online identity with Gravatars

If you’ve ever read a post on a blog and noticed a small photo or image asso­ci­ated with each author, or asso­ci­ated with authors of com­ments, then you’ve seen an ‘avatar’.

A few years ago, Gravatar launched as a way to allow people to store an avatar in a single loc­a­tion, and it would auto­mat­ic­ally be used on blogs util­iz­ing Gravatar technology.

The way it works is you simply cre­ate a Gravatar account, provid­ing the email address you want to asso­ci­ate with your avatar, and upload your avatar image.

The magic hap­pens behind the scene when you cre­ate a post or com­ment. The blog you’d just com­men­ted on looks up your email address on the Gravatar serv­er and provides the image on file.

If you want to update your avatar, just change the image at Gravatar and you’re done…everywhere Gravatar-sup­port­ing site you ever left a com­ment at will use your update image.

As an aside, I use Gravatar here. Leave a com­ment and if you have a Gravatar avatar, you’ll see it appear. If you don’t have one though, you’ll see a very cool kil­a­de­scope pat­tern called an ‘identicon’. This is anoth­er Gravatar fea­ture that cre­ates and stores unique, math-based avatar images for folks without avatars. The idea is that every­one gets an image…consistant with their online identity.

Very cool, and com­munity build­ing too boot!