With the latest version of Wordpress, “gravatars” are now implemented into Wordpress, eliminating the need for any plugins for gravatars to work. Since I try to keep the amount of plugins to run a site minimal, I hadn’t used them before. Now that they are part of Wordpress, we can use them here in the comments section.

So, what are “gravatars”? They are, simply speaking, “globally recognised avatars”. Most people know “avatars” from forums and this is the same thing, except they are used on blogs, so that people can identify you. Gravatars are uploaded to the Gravatar Website and are associated with your email address. No-one on this site gets to see your email address, so you do not need to be worried about that. If a blog has gravatars enabled, your gravatar will be displayed when you comment and, by now, a ton of blogs have enabled this feature. It’s not only Wordpress that uses gravatars; Movable Type, LiveJournal, Blogger, Textpattern - to name a few, can all use gravatars.

On the left here you see the default gravatar that is displayed alongside your name & comment unless you have signed up for an account with your email address and have uploaded an image. If you’d like to use a gravatar, then head over to the Gravatar Website and get yourself one. It’s easy to set up!

I think it’s kind of neat to have an image showing for the people actually taking the time to comment - and a big thankyou to those that do. =)