Gravatar – Unifying Social Media

Yesterday, whilst working on trying to make the blog look beautiful I noticed something bizarre. A comment of mine had my picture against it which good, however I was confused as to how it got there because I have never put my own picture on the Baby-Green Blog anywhere. I looked at the URI for […]

Yesterday, whilst working on trying to make the blog look beautiful I noticed something bizarre.

A comment of mine had my picture against it which good, however I was confused as to how it got there because I have never put my own picture on the Baby-Green Blog anywhere.

I looked at the URI for the image and it was this:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/f582c100a1c12ef21361c5b06a9ab278?s=32&d=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gravatar.com%2Favatar%2Fad516503a11cd5ca435acc9bb6523536%3Fs%3D32&r=PG

I was somewhat concerned to start with as I’d never heard of Gravatar so I headed over to their website (gravatar.com). I was impressed with the concept although still confused as to how they knew me. I tried logging in using my email address and my usual passwords and sure enough I got in.

After some digging, it turns out that Gravatar are now owned by WordPress – Who I registered with in order to post on their support forum relating to the blog a while back now, and they obviously merged resources and user lists etc.

So what is Gravatar then? Well it’s simple yet amazing actually. Users on the web are often posting all over the place and blogging etc, and the trouble with this is maintaining your identity. You change your profile picture in one place but forget the other 100 places. Gravatar allows you to assign yourself a picture, and then allows websites to track you using your email address.

So using Baby-Green Blog as the example here, the theme I am using has Gravatar support. For this reason, when someone posts a comment on the blog, if they use an email address registered with Gravatar, they will automatically have their profile image added to the post using that global image without any user input.

Cool or what huh?

5 thoughts on “Gravatar – Unifying Social Media

  1. Oh, and can you change the colour scheme slightly? The link I posted above is bright white on a grey background; I can hardly read it. My eyes are getting old, y’see…

  2. Look you, it’s not finished yet.
    It started life as another theme but I’m reverse engineering it to fit my needs, adding little touches of Silverlight here and there.

    Being that you are the only person who comments here 🙂 I’m working on the overall design etc before I start working on the comments and trackbacks section, but all in good time my friend.

    PS: Go and register at gravatar so you at least show your face to the world.

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