Wednesday

Why Use Gravatars

This entry is originally posted at experimental tech blog.

I’ve been blogging for almost a year and most blogsites that I often visit have these. I thought of making an entry on why bloggers should use gravatars in their blogs.

What is a gravatar?

According to Wordpress Codex:

Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users. Created by Tom Werner, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web. Avatars are usually an 80px by 80px image that the user will create themselves.

A Gravatar is essentially the same thing, but they are all hosted on a single server and are called up by encrypting the users’ email address via the MD5 algorithm. So instead of having one avatar on one forum you visit, and another at a blog you visit, you could have the same avatar at both.

Why use Gravatars?

• Gives an identity for every commenter.
• Just another cool plug in.
• I really don’t know

You can visit gravatar.com for more info. And you can download the gravatar-sign up plugin here, it allows commenters to sign up gor gravatar by checking the checkbox and filling in the desired password.