Let the world see who you are. Gravatar!

As I’m new to blogging world, I just noticed in people’s blog about the little picture right next to every comments that were posted. I was wandering how can I enable that feature in my blog. I’m looking around in my profile area, but I can’t find the place where I can change my profile picture. Finally, after doing some research, I found out that WordPress has already had that feature built-in into it through Gravatar.

So what is Gravatar?

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?

I found out that Gravatar is really useful. By using gravatar, it’s easier to spot who’s posting the comments when the comments get longer. Another great use of gravatar is to give the sense of community in your blog. When you see a comment with gravatar right next to it, you can tell little bit about that person, about his look, his style, his hobby, his personality, etc.

Many blog platforms supported gravatar. Among them, the ones that I know are Drupal, Joomla, WordPress, Blogger, and many others. Another thing about avatar is that it supports MPAA style ratings. What it means is that your site can restrict to only show gravatars whose content you are comfortable with.

If you haven’t had your gravatar yet, you should create one. Gravatar connects your email address with your gravatar image. So, every site that you are subcribed to (using the email address that you use when you created your gravatar image) and support gravatar will have your gravatar picture updated automatically in their sites.