Gravatar - How to get One What it is and How to Use It

bysubnetbuzz

698 followers

Updated 8 years ago

What is a Gravatar?

An avatar (not Gravatar) is the picture that represents you. On WA we all have avatars, for some it's a photo of us, for some a cartoon or some other picture.

Well, a Gravatar is a "Globally Recognized Avatar". The reason that's cool is because you can set up a Gravatar, and then on any site that recognizes them you just use the email associated with the Gravatar and presto, instant avatar.

If you change your Gravatar, you don't have to remember all the blogs and other sites that you've left your mark on, it changes there too.

Oh, and they're free ;)

How to get a Gravatar...

Step 1: https://gravatar.com

Step 2: Scroll down until you find the "Create Your Own Gravatar" button and click it.

Step 3: Enter an email address. This is important, because the email you use here needs to be the email address you'll be using for your website. It's possible to have multiple gravatar's though many have only one.

Step 4: Enter a user name. It has to be unique and they'll tell you if it's not.

Step 5: Enter a password.

Now just do the verification things that normally come with this kind of thing and then go through and set up an image like you would any other site and fill out your profile.

Go ahead, don't be shy, click around and get comfy.

Set Up Your Gravatar on Your Site

This is the most important part, because if you don't go through this process you won't be able to use Gravatars on your site. By doing this process you will also enable Gravatar's for your visitors that comment.

Step 1: Log into your WA wordpress account.

Step 2: Go to Settings->Discussions.

Step 3: Scroll down until you see the section on "Avatars".

Step 4: Check "Avatar Display".

Step 5: Select your "Maximum Rating". This just gives you some control on what kind of stuff shows up, I mean, after all, it is your site.

Step 6: Choose a default avatar for those poor unfortunate souls that aren't quite a tech savvy and cool as you. ;)

Step 7: If you haven't already go to Settings->General and enter your email address, the same email address you used to sign up.

Step 8: Go to Users and choose your user (and any other user you want to set up a Gravatar for) and enter the email address in there (again, if you haven't already).

Once you do all this, then on your user you should see your Gravatar image you set up next to the text "Profile Picture" and it'll have some text telling you to go to Gravatar.com to change your profile picture.

Congratulations! You now have a Gravatar, and whenever you enter your email address to post something on a Gravatar aware site, your shiny new Gravatar photo will be used.

I only had a bit of time tonight to write this and since I was in a hurry I may have missed something, if that's true shout it out and I'll edit it.

I hope you find this helpful, let me know what you think and feel free to shout with comments, improvements or questions...or just shout out and say hi :)