On your walk through the SCPC blog you might have noticed that there are strange things afoot, It appears that the comments have evolved and become more personal. This is a new feature that has been enabled called Gravatar.
Gravatar stands for Globally Recognized Avatar. An avatar is an image, picture or visual que that is associated with you and your online presence. It can be funny or serious. So you might have seen things like this in the blog comments:
I have let the team in on it before I posted this so that they can get theirs organized and some have done so and you might have seen them already. But the cool thing is that this is a feature for everyone including you! You can get your very on Gravatar by signing up.
But it gets better. Remember that Gravatars are “Globally Recognized”? Well that means that any blog anywhere on the Internet that has Gravatar enabled and you leave a comment, your Gravatar will show up there as well!
So you are probably wondering how this works. When you sign up to Gravatar with an email address and a Password you then upload your avatar to the server. The service associates that avatar with that email address. So you then head off to the SCPC blog and post a comment, we ask you for an email address, our software on this blog pulls the image from the server based on that email address. You can also associate multiple email addresses with the same account. So you might use one email address here and another on another site for commenting – you can add that other address.
If you are uncomfortable with a picture of yourself then you don’t have to, you can have an image of anything you like. But be warned that we have a “G” rating for Gravatars on this blog. If it is anything but that it will not appear (you set the rating of your Gravatar when you upload your image).
So here is what you have to do to get your very own Gravatar:
- Head over to Gravatar and sign up with your email address
- This will activate your account and you’ll get a confirmation email in seconds
- Click the link in the email to set your password
- You should now be signed into Gravatar
- Upload an image to use as your Gravatar
- Resize the image if you need to using their really cool resizing tool
- That is it
The service begins working straight away, so if you have posted a comment here before and you used the same email to register with Gravatar, all your comments will now have your unique avatar appearing with your comment. And everywhere else on Gravatar enabled sites.
Gravatar is owned by the same company that develops our blogging platform WordPress, known as Automatic. They will not spam you or share your data with any 3rd parties.
There is no better time to leave a comment than now! Test out your new Gravatar! If you choose not to sign up then you will see this next to your name:
Commonly known as the “Mystery Man”, don’t be a mystery, be creative and stand out from the crowd. Feel free to change your avatar as often as you like. Hopefully this will inspire you lot to get involved a bit more and drop us a comment now and then. If for nothing other than to express your creativity!
