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!
Cool.
The nice thing about Gravatar is the way you can use any size image to upload. Even using photoshop I have had a great deal of grief in the past trying to save my image as a jpeg less than 18 KB big (I’m sure somebody clever could have told me how) which is the max for many avatars.
@Graeme yeah I agree – it is very, very easy. Although now with broadband they have made avatars allowed to be a bit bigger – but not by much – about 25k on some sites. And hey! where is your avatar?
Great to see some of our users have gotten into Gravatars! w00T.
I am really pleased to see people having fun with it. I’ll know who you all are now
I think the Gravatars are pretty cool!! Sometimes it’s easy to forget that it’s actually people that leave comments! Having the photo there makes it easier to have follow-up conversations when you can remember the face as well as the comment.
Avatars are cool – but I am a little uneasy about leaving my face all over the web – It’s alright on this website but it might not be anywhere else.
@Dave do you walk down the street with a bag on your head? But the alternative is exactly as you have done – don’t use your head. I also love what Graeme has done. Top stuff!
Avatars are good but its a bit of a shame that we have so many comments about this subject than we do on the talks we hear at church . Is this were we are at that a picture of yourself generates more conversation.
Mind you its a good way of seeing who looks at the site. Dave Gray thanks for this addition.
Now it’s a competition to out-nerd each other, isn’t it now…
Give me some binoculars I can’t see Yocky…
@Trev NP mate. And in answer to your comment. I think that the reason you see a lot of responses here is that it is easy to post a response to something lighthearted. I don’t think it reflects how ppl feel or their attitude. But what it does do is allow people to get more comfortable dropping a comment and encourages more interaction on the blog. That is part the reason that we have introduced Gravatar. I admire your continued input Trev and you certainly “put your money where your mouth is”.
I really hope that people have fun with this and makes their comments more meaningful and personal. I am stoked that over the last 48 hours we have seen a huge spike in comments and the main reason is not this post. It was Pete’s post In search of 50 SCPC men for Jesus. So hope that is an encouragement and keeps the conversation going.
I think it’s interesting to hear how much fuss there is on choosing an appropriate photo! It’s not really “out-nerding” each other, although Photoshop skills can be an advantage!