I am not speaking the proverbial Greek and Latin here. These are fun new ways of creating an online Avatar of yourself, for more details on an Avatar check out Wikipedia. The best thing about them is that they will follow you everywhere on the Internet provided you use the same email that you have registered your Gravatar with for they will put out your photo or your Avatar based on your email. This means on every forum and blog where Gravatars are accepted whenever you leave a comment or a note with your email (which is a mandatory requirement to leave comments these days) you will find your Gravatar coming along with your name. For example check my comments section here. In case the commenter is not registered with Gravatar then a blank picture will be inserted instead. This is however not to the liking of many and hence to correct this problem step in Wavatar, Identicon, and MonsterID. Wavatar, Identicon, and MonsterID are all WordPress plugins which when activated will replace the commenter’s blank picture with an icon and if the commenter is registered with Gravatar then that will come through instead. To begin with you have to register with Gravatar and upload a picture of yourself or an Avatar should you choose to go with that instead of a picture. For bloggers who are running WordPress you will need to enable Gravatar on your blog so that the visitor’s Gravatar will show up in the comments section. A simple step to do this is…
Find “< ?php comment_text() ?>” in your comments.php file from your theme.
Put this above it “< ? echo get_avatar( get_comment_author_email(), ’60′ ) ?>” and save comments.php.
That’s it! Your comments section will now display Gravatars of all commenters on your blog. This will only show the Gravatar of the commenter and a blank picture if the commenter is not registered with Gravatar. If you want more than the blank picture to be displayed, check my comments section here, then head over to Wavatar, Identicon, and MonsterID and take your pick depending on the icons displayed. For the record I have myself gone with Shamus Young’s Wavatars. Go ahead and identify yourself everywhere now.
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