Unless you’ve been avoiding blogs over the past year, you’ll notice that many contain small images next to each comment, which represents the person who has left the comment. As you can tell, the feature has been utilized on this site.

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

The Basics: A Gravatar is a globally recognized avatar, created by Tom Werner (acquired by Automattic in october of 2007), typically between 80 and 512 (square) pixels.

Why You Should Take Advantage of it: More than ever, you want to be recognized online. There is no better way to dot this than through an image that instantly sets you apart from everyone else. It also lets your users connect to one another, even though they really didn’t have to sign up for anything extra to add to your blog’s community. Now that you understand some of the basics, what are the other features of implementing Gravatars on your blog/site?

• They’re easy to implement. It might take some extra lines of code to add support for them to your site, but other than that, you don’t have to make any major changes (besides style changes).
• Everyone can take advantage of them. Once you have a Gravatar account, you will be able to display your “avatar” across all sites that support the feature.
• They’re fast. Since Automattic acquired the service last year, they’ve added a number of servers, including cache support, speeding up the load time of these images – you aren’t hosting them on your site. So, there’s really no reason to discount the feature just for page load time.
• Ratings. Most likely, you’ll want to appeal to the tastes of your readers. Therefore, you can moderate which Gravatars make it through the content filter, using an MPAA style rating (G, PG, R, and X).
• The service is focused. Unlike many other companies (although this one is owned by another company), it doesn’t have to do multiple things. All it does is serve images to your site, nothing more and nothing less. It’s not as complicated to use as you might think.
• Identifies spammers. Many spammers won’t spend the time to create a Gravatar account, so you’ll nearly instantly know whether a comment is spam (although not all users have a Gravatar account). It would also mean that they would have to use a valid email address, possibly exposing their identity.

You could use either a photo, a logo of your blog/company, or a product that you may be promoting to distribute your brand among all sites you leave comments at or can be associated with the Gravatar service.

Creating Your Own Gravatar

The simplest process would be to create your own avatar and associate it with your main email address. This way, you will always be able to use the feature, no matter what site you visit. Like many other things you do online, the more your image stands out, the more people that will want to visit your site,.

To sign up right now, click here. Input your email address, then activate your account in the email that is sent to you (within 24 hours). Add a nickname and password at this stage. 

add an image to your account, selectable from your computer, an image on the Internet, or through your WordPress.com account. You can crop and customize the rating of the image, or add additional images/email addresses to your account.

Implementing Gravatars

The process is easy to get your own avatar and enable Gravatars on your site. Most likely, they are already activated, but not being displayed due to your theme – it is a front-end feature that needs to be coded.

To skip through the fluff below, you can quickly set it up using coding, with setup instructions available at the WordPress Codex.

Guides for easy installation can be found on the official Gravatar site for a nearly unlimited suite of blogging and content management system platforms, including:

– MovableType

– WordPress

– TextPattern

– Expression Engine

– PMachine

– Nucleus

– Drupal

– YACS (CMS)

– Blojsom (Blog Server)

– Ruby on Rails

– Smarty

– OSX Leopard Address Book Plugin

– Pivot/PivotX

– Joomla

– IP.Board

– Blogger

– LiveJournal

Additional Implementations: PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, Java, ASP.NET, ASP (Classic), Python, and Ruby.

Note: Some of the platforms and solutions above are merely hacks, rather than complete plugin integration. Therefore, you have to be aware of the risks involved if you install support on an unsupported or undocumented platform.

When you install support fro the feature on your blog, you will notice that, when looking at the code view of your live website, there is a universal structure for all images. In other words, they are all based off a base structure, then the rest of it is using a hexadecimal MD5 hash of the requested user’s lowercased email address with all whitespace trimmed. This is a security measure, preventing your email address from being exposed and used by others.

Example: http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3b3be63a4c2a439b013787725dfce802

Other attributes can be added to the end of this, such as ?s=80 for the size of the image (in pixels), ?r=g for the rating of the image (default is G). Finally, you could denote a default icon, using the following: ?d=identicon, ?d=monsterid, or ?d=wavatar.

Plugins

Plugins allow you to add the feature to your site (although WordPress has added support for the feature in recent versions); adding code may still be required. Some of these add additional functionality to the feature. Recommended for people who haven’t updated yet.

• WP-Gravatar – Lets you use Gravatar, MyBloglog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID, or Favico.ico files with your comments. It has been tested on WordPress 2.1 through 2.6. Numerous features have also been included, giving you more control over how they are displayed and implemented on your site. 
• Easy Gravatars – Does one thing – enables you to display Gravatars on your site for the people who comment on your posts. Requires WordPress Version 2.0.4, compatible up to WordPress 2.5. All you have to do is activate the plugin.
• WP-SnapAvatar – Uses a “snapshot” of the commentator’s website or blog rather than a default image. Requires WP 2.0.2, compatible up to 2.5.2. 
• Openvatar – An alternative service (plugin) that allows you to generate an Openvatar URL complete with size, default, and border options. Plugin hasn’t been updated since February 2008.

Identicons are similar to Gravatars, although they are automatically added for people who do not want to implement their own custom favicon/avatar, although they can also refer to the image that identifies you.

Conclusion

Now is the best time to add support for the Gravatar feature on your site or create your own account. It is increasingly important to define your main focus, representing yourself and your creativeness. Don’t stick withe the default image when leaving a comment. It’ll mean one less thing you have to focus on when branding yourself, as your image will instantly be associated with each comment.

There are few, if any, negatives to adding support to your site. Number one, you’ll receive more comments from people who use the OpenID/Gravatar format for leaving comments (if you support it). Try it out today.