gravatar

Gravatars: Why Both Commenters and Publishers Should Use It

October 20, 2008 By Thord Daniel Hedengren

Gravatars are global recognizable avatars, a hosted avatar service for profile pictures, usually used to pimp comment sections on blogs, but also on forums, author pages, and whatnot. We’re using Gravatars here on Devlounge, both for the author byline at the top of each post, and for commenters.

It used to be a poor web service, actually. Gravatar started out great, but then got massive issues, having a hard time serving all the avatars across the web. That all changed when Automattic bought the service, and with the hardware support of their servers, Gravatars are now delivered promptly and without hassle.

I’d say they have managed to get the Gravatar service to where and what it should be: A stable global avatar supplier, with support for multiple email addresses for the more schizophrenic among us, me included.

So why should you have a Gravatar associated with your email when commenting, and why should you have Gravatar support on your blog or forum?

Commenters: Get a Gravatar!

No matter if you comment to voice your opinion first and foremost, or if you have a more hidden agenda (like getting visitors to your site, or promote a product or service for that matter), you should have a Gravatar. Not only does it make your comment stand out more than the ones who doesn’t it’s also an opportunity to promote your brand, be it yourself or something else, a little.

You could use:

a photo as a Gravatar, which will show off your face.
a logo as a Gravatar, which will build brand recognition.
a product picture as a Gravatar, which will build product awareness.

You could also have a humorous Gravatar, or a serious one, or whatever you’d like to gain attention to. Having a good and thought-through Gravatar is a way to be seen, and to get a message across, in addition to your actual comment.

For myself, I’ve got a photo. This is suitable for several reasons, one being to show my face and therefor imply that I’ve got nothing to hide. Or something like that.

Publishers: Add Gravatar Support!

Publishers should definitely add Gravatar support if they have any kind of user interaction on their site. As I said, user comments is a pretty common way to add Gravatar support, but you could also add it to a forum, a more elaborate guestbook, or similar.

So why would you want to do that? Well, first of all, it will be another push to get readers involved. Think about it, if a reader is aware of the benefits of having a Gravatar, and possibly using it to promote a brand of some kind, then that’s just another reason to leave a comment to your post. Not only does the reader get to write a comment, the Gravatar further adds to the free exposure. The same goes for forums, of course.

Another reason is to help you manage spam. Most spammers don’t bother to get Gravatars for their spambots, if any, and that actually makes it a little easier for you to manage your comments in moderation. No Gravatar doesn’t mean that the comment is spam, but it is way more likely than if there is a Gravatar. It works the other way around as well: If a commenter’s got a Gravatar, it’s probably not a spammer, at least not an automatic one.

Also, adding Gravatars makes the comments more pretty and alive. That in turn makes them all the more appealing to participate in.

How to Add a Gravatar

Commenters, visit Gravatar.com and sign up. If you’re using several email addresses, you’ll want to add a Gravatar to each one. They could be the same, or completely different ones. It’s easy enough.
WordPress publishers, there’s built-in Gravatar support in WordPress. Read up in the Codex, or use a plugin. Want to hack it? We’ve got a tutorial!
Other publishers, you can add Gravatar support too. It’s pretty simple, read up on it here.

Are you using Gravatars on your blog or forum? Why, or why not?

Getting Gravatars on your Single Posts in WordPress

June 12, 2008 By Thord Daniel Hedengren

Gravatars are global recognizable avatars, being avatars hosted at Gravatar.com, a service run by Automattic, creators of WordPress and WordPress.com, these days. Since version 2.5 of WordPress there’s built in support for Gravatars, using a template tag to display the appropriate avatar, or a placeholder. The default WordPress theme, being Kubrick renamed as default, uses it in comments, which is the common usage of gravatars.

However, with the recent redesign of Devlounge, I decided to use gravatars rather than theme-bound avatars for displaying the author’s pretty face. You can’t just pull the gravatar code from comments.php to do that, you need to work a bit with the template tag.

First, to display a gravatar you need to register an e-mail with the Gravatar.com service. There, you connect an avatar with the e-mail address. The key is the e-mail address, that’s important to remember.

Displaying the Gravatar

The code used here on Devlounge, for the avatar on the top of the single post pages, is the following:

[php][/php]

So what does it mean? The get_avatar() is the WordPress call the Gravatar functionality. As you can see, I’m using the template tag get_the_author_id() to fetch the singe post’s author ID, which will tell get_avatar() what e-mail to use to look for. I could use other template tags to fetch the correct e-mail, but I went with the ID one.

40 is the width and height of the avatar in pixels. 16, 32, 48 or 64 are more common uses, but 40 pixels fits the design for me.

If you wanted to, you could add a path to the default avatar URL, so that not the default one from Gravatar.com is displayed for people not having registered an avatar. In this case, I’m going with the default one because people are used to it, and when they see that a gravatar can be used, they might be more inclined to get one.

For comparison, in the comments the gravatar code looks like this:

[php][/php]

Here $comment calls the comment in question’s author e-mail is used to fetch the appropriate avatar, and that one will be 32×32 pixels in size. As above, I could have added a path to a default avatar.

Gravatar Beta Review

February 16, 2007 By Ronald Huereca

Bes Zain — a former Gravatar moderator — helped contribute to this article.

As reported earlier, the Gravatar Public Beta is live. Within this review, you’ll find screenshots and my opinions of Gravatar’s new features. Please note that Gravatar is a paid service ($10) if you want more than two gravatars and/or more than one e-mail address.

Registration

Since I was already registered for Gravatar, I didn’t need to re-register which was nice. And my old Gravatar was there as well. The main screen — dubbed My Gravatars — shows which gravatars you have and allows you to add additional gravatars and/or e-mail addresses.

Adding a Gravatar – Image Uploading

Since I didn’t particularly like my old gravatar, I decided to add in another one. Gravatar allows you to upload a picture from your computer (the file I used was 1.55 MB) and crop it from there.

One thing I’d like to see here is a status indicator for the image upload and also a limit on the file size uploaded.

Cropping the Gravatar

Now that I had my spiffy picture uploaded, I wanted to crop it. Gravatar conveniently has a cropping tool that allows you to easily do this. One thing I did notice is that the cropping tool gives you much more control when the picture is at a higher resolution.

Rating the Gravatar

Once my gravatar was all cropped and ready, I got to rate it. As tempted as I was to rate my gravatar “X”, I decided to give my gravatar the Disney friendly “G” rating.

There is a potential for abuse here, but I’m glad Gravatar decided to allow users to rate their own gravatars. However, I foresee a problem with the reporting mechanism for abuse. What if it takes too long for an offending gravatar to be taken down? What if the admin is on vacation or something?

When reporting an “under-rated” gravatar, all you can enter in is the offending URL and an explanation. What I think should happen here is that the user can enter in the gravatar’s URL and give the gravatar a suggested rating. If enough users change the rating (say from G to X), then the offending gravatar is automatically changed to a neutral image until the owner of the gravatar changes it and/or the rating.

The owner of the offending gravatar would get a message telling him/her that the gravatar has been labeled as offensive. The owner can then appeal the offensive rating or change the gravatar and/or rating, which will then go into an admin queue. This takes the admin mostly out of the loop and makes the users the moderators.

Select Which Gravatar to Use

After uploading, cropping, and rating my gravatar, I had way too many choices to chose from. However, if I want to add one more gravatar, I would have to pay $10 a year. Rather than do that, I selected the gravatar I just uploaded.

Removing a Gravatar

Removing a gravatar is simple as well. Just hover over the gravatar you wish to delete and click the bright and shiny red “X”.

The Future of Gravatar?

It sounds like from this WordPress Podcast that Tom Werner is planning on turning Gravatar into a pseudo-MyBlogLog.

I’m not incredibly convinced Gravatar will be able to pull it off, especially since Gravatar has had such a shaky start. MyBlogLog can almost be a full competitor since it offers a full profile, community, and avatars for comments as well. Gravatar will be playing catch-up for a while if anything.

However, MyBlogLog is bloated and Gravatar (right now) is extremely easy to use, especially for those who don’t own blogs. If Gravatar starts turning into MyBlogLog and still has the admin/server difficulties, there will be nothing to stop people from flocking to MyBlogLog for good, especially since MyBlogLog offers a great amount of services for free.

I also don’t personally see Gravatar surviving very long unless the service secures some serious funding, and right now ten dollars is a little much to pay for more e-mail addresses and gravatars.

Conclusion

I suggest giving Gravatar a second chance and checking out the beta. The service is much improved over what it was before and very easy to use. I foresee a significant problem with Gravatar as far as abuse goes, however.

My skepticism is high as far as the survivability of what I think is a valuable (but not ten dollars worth) service. MyBlogLog is a viable competitor, but it carries a lot of baggage that Gravatar doesn’t have at the moment.

Right now the service is still in beta and is having its ups and downs. If Gravatar cannot reliably stay online and functioning past the beta, I predict that the Gravatar launch will not be a success, especially since the service has already left a bad taste in a lot of people’s mouths.