Blog Reader Tip: Make a Gravatar

What’s a Gravatar? Put simply it is basically the avatar (the tiny image) you see next to your comments on several blogs, like this one. Gravatar is actually the work of Tom Werner and while I will be the first to say the service has been wrought with scalability issues (they grew really damn fast), I will also point out that I really dig the concept - in fact I wish I had thought of it myself!

Doesn’t this look better than the default image?

With a simple plugin for most publishing software you can add Gravatars to your blog and here at MA we set our Gravatars to cache locally, so it doesn’t depend on the Gravatar website, cough, staying alive. Why not set up your own Gravatar for use on MacApper, and many other blogs. It takes literally 1 minute and most importantly it’s a great visual reminder of who is taking place in the discussion.

Feel free to use this thread to test out your own Gravatars but keep in mind that the caching system is set to cron every hour, so your image may not show up right away.

For more information on how to implement Gravatars into your projects see their implementation guide.

share permalink ping 7 Comments