Gravatars enabled for comments

Just a quick note. I was hanging out, “spending time” with Sarah before she left this morning, so I decided to look more in gravatars and get a real understanding of what they are and how they apply to blogs.

Gravatars = Globally Recognized Avatars

Hopefully most people know what an avatar is, it’s the little icon your use in comments and on forums to identify yourself. All of the wordpress feeds have been abuzz about Gravatars because WordPress 2.5 has some sort of functionality to use this service built into the core. But while we wait for that unknown release, I added some code to my comments.php file to get your Gravatars to show up. I was using the “Easy Gravatars” plugin to start, but I couldn’t figure out how to change where the code was inserted in my comments.php file, because the positioning was less than perfect or ideal. I just decided to go the manual route instead.

I like the idea of global avatars because it helps universally brand your identity and you only have to update your avatar in one place, on Gravatar.com with your chosen email address. I have heard that there is another similar service, MyBlogLog who also provides a universal avatar solution. If you take a look at the comments on any post by clicking on my ghosty friend on the homepage excerpts or scrolling down to the bottom of the post (if there are any) You’ll see most of your comments have an appropriate desaturated Food Fight avatar next to them. These are for commenters who don’t have a Gravatar yet.

My question to you is, how many people actually use Gravatars? Does anyone even bother with this? Do more people have avatars at MyBlogLog? Hopefully some of your will at least check out some sort of global avatar service and be full on geek just like me:)

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