What is a Gravatar?
A Gravatar is a small icon that appears next to your comments on blogs. Short for Globally Recognized Avatar, they help identify you as the author of a comment and overall make the internet a much prettier place. Although I think commenting on blogs is a dying artform (we’d much rather share the post on Facebook and talk about it there), I still think having a Gravatar is a basic function of being a citizen of the web. It’s free and it’s easy, so why not go grab one today?
First, visit gravatar.com and click on the big blue button that says “Create Your Own Gravatar.” From there, you will be asked enter an email address, username, and password. Once you do this, you’ll receive an activation email with a link to click on to activate your account. Once your account is activated, you will be prompted to add an image. Use whatever image you want to represent you: a profile photo, a picture of a cheeseburger, a funny e-card…the choice is yours. Now that you have that taken care of, whenever you leave a comment on a blog that has Gravatars enabled, your image will appear next to the comment instead of the dull, lifeless default image. Ta-da! Now leave some comments!
PS You can have multiple Gravatars for different purposes. I have one tied to my personal email address and one tied to my work email, so that way, I can leave different types of messages on different blogs depending on their subject matter. So go ahead, create one for all of your email addresses!
image courtesy of Daniel Semper and Gravatar
