Gravatars
Posted by Max Miecchi in Information Technology Tuesday, 16 March 2010 14:15 No Comments
If you read blogs, you’re probably already familiar with gravatars – custom images that represent commenters. These images are a kind of personal logo that identifies them and says something about their personality.
Here’s how gravatars work.
A commenter creates an image suitable for a gravatar and uploads it to his account on http://gravatar.com. The gravatar is rated using pretty much the same ratings as the movie industry: G, PG, R, and X.
These ratings are used by bloggers to set limits on the kinds of gravatars that appear on their sites (a gravatar with a G rating will appear everywhere while a gravatar with an X rating may not appear on many blogs at all).
Meanwhile, a blogger (like me) sets up his/her blog to enable it for gravatars.
Then, when a commenter submits a comment, the blog’s gravatar plugin (automatic since WordPress 2.5) takes the commenter’s e-mail address (submitted in the comment form) and attempts to find a match at gravatar.com.
If it finds a match, it displays the corresponding image.
If there’s no image on file, the blog software either displays nothing or displays a default image chosen by the blogger.
Do you have a gravatar now? Show it off by entering a brief comment on this post.
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