Globally Recognized Avatar

July 29, 2004

GravatarI’ve recently imple­mented Gra­vatar (Glob­ally Rec­og­nized Avatar) into kartooner.com. Basi­cally, it’s an avatar ser­vice for web blogs, forums and community-orientated scripts like PHP­Nuke or Mambo. The con­cept is that the Gra­vatar server, which stores the 80×80 pixel images, rec­og­nizes and matches the email address you use when you com­ment on a blog and inserts your avatar image next to your comment.

The result is a more per­son­al­ized com­ment with your cus­tom avatar, be it a ram­buc­tious pirate or a dazed and con­fused senior cit­i­zen. Imple­ment­ing the Gra­vatar code into your respec­tive blog­ging CMS is a piece of cake. The cre­ator, Tom Werner of Mojombo.com, has pro­vided a vari­ety of imple­men­ta­tion meth­ods for pop­u­lar blog­ging appli­ca­tions like Word­Press, Textpat­tern and Mov­able­type — it’s just a mat­ter of down­load­ing and installing the plug-in and tweak­ing your templates.

So what are you wait­ing for? Go reg­is­ter a free account, and watch your avatar mag­i­cally appear next to your com­ments. You watch, you’ll want to com­ment just to see your Gravatar. 

22 comments

[…] ate-functions-category.php on line 441

Gra­vatar
07/31/2004

Erik pointed out on his web­site a great and fun tool, Gra­vatar. It allows you to have your own […]

by CHOPSOCKY » 2004 » July » 31 on July 31, 2004 at 4:06 pm. Reply #

genannt, sodass den anderen Lesern auf einen Blick ersichtlich ist, wer hier kom­men­tiert hat. Voraus­set­zung ist, dass der Weblog­ger den nöti­gen Gravatar-Code inte­gri­ert hat. Ein Beispiel für Gravatar-Bilder von Kommentar-Schreibern bei kar­tooner (engl.) [via Webpro­pa­ganda] Link«

by Der Geist in der Suchmaschine - Ablage Juli 2004 on July 30, 2004 at 10:10 am. Reply #

I’m not much into avatars but can’t help how amus­ing the name is for me, since “gra­vata” is Por­tuguese Brazil­ian for “tie”. There­fore “gra­vatar” would sound some­thing like “to tie” (an avatar to some­thing else?)

On sec­ond thought…

by beto on July 29, 2004 at 12:26 pm. Reply #

I real­ize some peo­ple may not be inter­ested in avatars, it’s a dif­fer­ent con­cept for blogs. Sure, I’ve seen var­i­ous blogs use the Fav­i­con for the commenter’s pro­file, but I’ve never seen avatar spe­cific graph­ics for each commenter.

It is inter­est­ing, how­ever, that “gra­vata” means to tie. Makes sense for a project like this.

For my avatar, I’ve cho­sen one of the char­ac­ters from Sidev­ille, as drawn by mas­ter illus­tra­tor, Scott Thig­pen.

by kartooner on July 29, 2004 at 1:09 pm. Reply #

Okay, not exactly “tie” — more like “neck­tie” really :D

by beto on July 29, 2004 at 4:10 pm. Reply #

Beto, you should add your comic char­ac­ter (like you have on the Aston­ish Fac­tory). :)

What have you got to lose? It’s a fun service.

by kartooner on July 29, 2004 at 4:17 pm. Reply #

It’s Moe.…who is com­ing out of the bar-closet.

by Dad on July 29, 2004 at 9:09 pm. Reply #

I’ve had my gra­vatar up for a few days, but never found any place that used it. So this is a good excuse. :-)

I’ll change it to one with my actual mugshot as soon as I can find a good photo of me.

by Johan Svensson on July 29, 2004 at 11:01 pm. Reply #

I just can’t keep up with all these new­fan­gled things. I just barely got a favicon…now I have to make a gravatar?

Really, it’s a pretty cool idea, and one that will prob­a­bly take off nicely. I’ll still wait till I’m the last kid on the block to have one.

by Eric on July 30, 2004 at 3:03 am. Reply #

Its a nice idea and well imple­mented. I’ll be adding the code to my cus­tom blog (PHP) over the weekend.

I did notice how­ever, that the PHP and PERL code to imple­ment this is con­sid­er­ably sim­pler than the other method.

by Richard@Home on July 30, 2004 at 7:33 am. Reply #

How about tying it to a url as well as an email?

by Richard@Home on July 30, 2004 at 7:33 am. Reply #

Eric: I know just what you mean. All of these new­fan­gled gad­gets and so lit­tle time. I just love adopt­ing new and dif­fer­ent gad­gets for blogs, and con­sid­er­ing this is a per­sonal site, I think it’s well justified.

Richard: Actu­ally, tying it to a URL would be a bet­ter method in my opin­ion con­sid­er­ing we all use dif­fer­ent emails (be it our Hot­mail, GMail, Yahoo or domain accounts). Tom Werner, the cre­ator, has already men­tioned that he will be incor­po­rat­ing a mul­ti­ple email fea­ture into each of the accounts.

by kartooner on July 30, 2004 at 8:36 am. Reply #

Johan: You mean you’re not the guy from Super Troop­ers? What a let down.
;)

by kartooner on July 30, 2004 at 8:38 am. Reply #

How long does it usu­ally take to get your Avatar okayed?

Mul­ti­ple emails (or urls) is a great idea! :-)

by Richard@Home on July 30, 2004 at 9:55 am. Reply #

Richard: From my expe­ri­ence with the ser­vice, it took a few hours. Tom Werner has to autho­rize them and append a rat­ing to the graphic.

Just go with the old cus­tomer ser­vice adage; Under­promise, overde­liver :)

by kartooner on July 30, 2004 at 9:58 am. Reply #

I chose to imple­ment emails as the pri­mary key to gra­vatars for a very impor­tant rea­son: I can ver­ify that the actual owner of the email is the one upload­ing his or her gra­vatar. If the sys­tem was based on URL alone, there would be no way to ver­ify that the URL you are sign­ing up for is actu­ally yours, mak­ing it pos­si­ble to spoof gra­vatars for other peo­ple, which of course is intolerable.

It would be nice to have URL key func­tion­al­ity, but unfor­tu­nately I can­not imple­ment it for the above men­tioned rea­son. Hope that clears up any con­fu­sion or gra­vatar related disparagement. =)

BTW, I like your site kartooner!

by Tom Werner on July 30, 2004 at 8:56 pm. Reply #

Thanks Tom for clear­ing that up. I sup­pose it’s all on the honor sys­tem, regard­less, con­sid­er­ing any­one could use my email address at another Gravatar-enabled site. Although I can’t imag­ine why they would do such a thing. :)

Also, I appre­ci­ate your sen­ti­ment about my site. It’s been a work in progress for the past cou­ple of years and keeps evolving.

by kartooner on July 30, 2004 at 9:13 pm. Reply #

I’d seen this men­tioned briefly some­where a cou­ple of days ago, but this is the first site I’ve seen imple­ment it. I like the idea. Really sim­ple and easy to imple­ment for WP. Adds a lit­tle bit of per­son­al­ity. But I’ve been incred­i­bly bor­ing and thrown up my fav­i­con for now :)

by Gary on August 2, 2004 at 10:09 pm. Reply #

Gary: Not to men­tion it’s easy to scan the com­ments for the site owner and/or any spe­cific per­son. I’ve found that with just plain text com­ments it’s dif­fi­cult to dif­fer­en­ti­ate between the com­ments them­selves and the per­son who posted the comment.

by kartooner on August 3, 2004 at 8:57 am. Reply #

This is very cool, i’ve just imple­mented it in my own site.
It’s Cool to have the same avatar in the blogs and in deviantart and in the forums and Mes­sen­ger and XP and… wel, you’ve got the idea

Thanks for the link

by Sosa on September 9, 2004 at 10:58 am. Reply #

Gra­vatar
Desde hoy este sitio cuenta con Gra­vatar, un ser­vi­cio que per­mite incluír una ima­gen de iden­ti­fi­cación o avatar de los comen­tantes en cada comen­tario, como si se tratáse de un foro. Gra­vatar sig­nifica avatar recono­cido globalmente…

by Super Mag | Weblog de Armando Sosa on September 9, 2004 at 11:00 am. Reply #

Okay, I’m just com­ment­ing to see what my Gra­vatar looks like on here. Nice look­ing tem­plate on this site.

by Rusty on October 21, 2004 at 2:20 pm. Reply #

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