So you’ve been looking at a few blogs, and you see that some of the comments have a little image next to them. How did those people do that? A person comments, and there’s a custom picture sitting there next to their comment! They have an account with Gravatar.com, and you can too. This post will explain how to set up your “gravatar” so that when you comment on blogs, you too will have that custom image you been longing for.
What is a “Gravatar”?
A gravatar, according to Gravatar.com, is a globally recognized avatar. Got it? Well, for those that are utterly confused by what I just wrote, I’ll break it down for you.
An avatar is a graphical image, like my little kitty to the left, that represents someone. The kitty is my avatar, and everywhere I go, I use this same image. He’s pretty much my own personal brand that I have created for myself. My softer side as it were. 
Yes, Hellboy and I have something in common, we both love cute, furry little kitty cats.
So, just like you can instantly recognize a can of Coke (the soda of course), where ever you see this image on the Internet, you can suspect that I’ve been there. Not always of course, there could be others using the same image as I am, but what are the chances that someone has a fluffy white kitty that looks ready to hop on the back of a motorbike and ride? Not many I suspect. I like to think he’s in the middle of saying ‘Let’s motor!’. Silly, I know.
So, with that said, a “globally recognized avatar” would be the same thing, but on a global scale. When I go from blog to blog, I enter the same email address that I used to sign up with at gravatar.com, and if the blog has support for gravatar images, then when I post a comment, it will reach out to gravatar.com and get my image for display next to my comment. If the blog doesn’t support gravatar’s, then you won’t see an image.
Setting up your gravatar image
To set up your gravatar, follow these simple steps:
- Find your Image – Find yourself an image you would want to use as a gravatar. You’re going to have to supply one, so you might as well find one first right? Right.
- Sign-Up with Gravatar.com - Visit Gravatar.com and sign up. You will need to supply the site with an email address. This is the key to using gravatar’s. When you enter a comment on a blog that supports gravatars, you will use the same email address that you did to sign up with gravatar.com.
Once you have entered an email address, you will need to check your email for a confirmation email from them. Click the link found in the email and continue to the next step.
- Confirm your Email – Now that you have confirmed your email with gravatar.com, you can enter in a nickname and your password for accessing the gravatar.com administration pages.
Your nickname needs to be unique amongst all the other gravatar users. Why? Because they have something up their sleeves that they are not letting on to, and I believe it may also be due to their integration with WordPress. Anyway, find a nickname and enter your password twice, then hit the “Signup” button.
- Upload your Image – It’s time to upload your image. Click the “Add one by clicking here!” link to be taken to a selection page. You can provide an image from either your hard drive, an image on the Internet (an http address) or from your WordPress.com account if you have a pre-existing avatar there.
If you choose your hard drive, click the “Browse” button to point to the image on your local disk drive and click “next”. If you choose an Internet address, paste in the URL to the image you want to use. If you choose the WordPress option, you should have used the same nickname or email address as your WordPress account. Gravatar.com will automatically find your avatar on the WordPress system and bring it in.
Supported image types are JPEG, GIF or PNG files.
- Crop your Image – Because images can be a variety of shapes and sizes, Gravatar.com will allow you to identify a portion of the image you uploaded that will be used to make your gravatar. You can call it “squaring off” or “cropping an image” as it is officially called. Using your mouse, click and drag a square around the portion of the image you want to identify as the area that will make up your gravatar image. If you want the whole image, then you need to create a square around the whole image. Please note that gravatar’s are sized to exact specifications, which is an 80×80 pixel square. the gravatar interface will automatically shrink whatever selection you make to an 80×80 square. You will see a preview on the right hand side to help you get the picture you want.
When you are satisfied with your handiwork, simply click the “Crop and Finish!” button on the top right hand side of the page.
- Rate your Image – Choose a rating for your gravatar. Obviously, there are those out there that think a severed head or pair of breasts best suits them, others may think Dumbo or some other Disney character. (Never thought I could ever use all those those in the same sentence, but look at me…always surprising myself…). Either way, use your best judgement and select the rating for your gravatar. (Remember, this is going to be your ‘brand’ that people will begin to recognize you with. So be smart about it, especially if you plan on doing any Internet business or serious blogging.)
The rating is used by web sites to ensure that some graphics do not display if they are beyond a certain rating. I’m not sure how well this actually works. I’d call a pair of boobs pretty tame myself and give them a G rating, but then, the majority of people don’t think like me either, so I’m at their mercy on that one. Unfortunately for the world.
Click the rating that best describes the level of violence or nudity in your image, as that is what it really boils down to right?
- Congratulations! – That’s it! You’ve created a gravatar and you are ready to begin using it. Well, there may be a slight delay in it appearing on other sites actually. I’d give it a few minutes before you try it out, just to be sure. I tried it immediately after creating one, one time, and my browser hung while the web site tried to fetch my newly created gravatar.
Try out your new gravatar!
Go ahead, leave a comment down below and lets see your handiwork. I don’t have any rating level set on my blog, so let them rip! I will, of course, remove anything I find objectionable to my audience and friends, but not until I’ve had a chance to see it.
Leave me a comment below and let me know if this helped you out. Did I miss anything in the process? Did gravatar.com change their site on me and this whole thing is now completely wrong? (some day, that will happen…) Do you need any further assistance getting things to work for you? Just let me know, I’m here to help you out.
I hope you enjoyed this explanation and tutorial on gravatar’s as much as I enjoyed writing it. Please stumble or bookmark with your favorite bookmarking app if you felt this was worthy. If you would like to get more of my writing delivered to you directly, please subscribe to my blog by email, or grab the feed and pop it in your reader.
Peace and love, and let’s see those gravatars!
Wayne John is a health coach for people that want to lose weight, gain weight, improve athletic performance, or simply maintain a healthy lifestyle. Wayne has lost over 55 pounds and improves his current health every day by using simple, straight-forward techniques that anyone can integrate into their lives to achieve the same. Contact Wayne today to realize your own health and fitness goals, or get started now by completing and submitting the free Wellness Profile. He also has been developing websites since 1995 and programming solutions for clients even longer. He'd rather be outside having fun in the sun though.
Just use the same email address that you used with gravatar, and your gravatar image will display just like mine here…
Thank you very much for this one, I haven’t been able to figure it out yet. I hopefully will have an image by the end of the day!
Good one, Wayne. Sometimes sights and services give only a short description of what they are offering and of course it normally is slanted toward all the positives. It’s good to get a more balanced explanation of the ins and outs of what you are doing and what the benefits are along with what you can expect.
I would prefer a more symbolic cartoon for as my avatar, but I followed your instructions above and as you can see, voila—old dude has a gravatar. any suggestions where one might find a good collection of toons one might adopt?
Gary
http://threescoreplusten.blogspot.com/
Informative tutorial Wayne. I wrote one myself about adding a gravatar. I had been working on it and just finished it.
Gary, you can find tine gravatars at any avatar site.
I like this one. lol
http://www.invision-graphics.com/wallpaper-3771-mickey-funny-avatar.html
Well let’s see if this new fangled thing works. If so my ugly mug should be on the right side of this comment.
Wayne! what’s going on here? I jumped through all the hoops and it didn’t work.
Demeur are you using the correct email address?
Everything matched up when I created it. Don’t tell me I’m lost in cyberspace.
@Gary! You did it! Woo hoo! Not such a bad looking chap either, hahahaa. What I would try it doing a google search and flip over to the images and see what you can find. [b]Watch out for copyrights though![/b]
I also just found this site by googling the terms ‘free avatars’ – http://avatars.jurko.net/
@Demeur – Like Rose asked, what address did you use on Gravatar.com?
Hmm…the animated ones might not work so well, but there are plenty of non-animated ones there to choose from….
Using the right email address. I just chected it twice.
Wierd. The image comes up on some sites but not here.
@Demeur – You’re using Safari aren’t you? Can you try a different browser perhaps? http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/mozillafirefox.html
Is anyone else using Safari and the gravatar works for them?
Wayne could his gravatar be stuck in the cache?
That may be possible, but if you look at the source for the ‘empty head’ image above and paste that into a new browser, you will see his gravatar just fine…odd.
No love there…going to think about this a bit…be back soon.
It’s not showing in Firefox either.
I believe this is due to caching, either on my end, or on gravatar’s end. I changed my image, and I’m still showing my old one…hmm
I sent a note off to their tech support. I’ll see what happens later. Strange no?
Here’s a try with Foxfire.
His gravatar checks out fine… http://en.gravatar.com/site/check
Still looking…
Quite strange…but if you are experiencing it, surely someone else will too right?
I’m reviewing the site code to see if I can find anything…
Demeur, can you toss another comment in here to check if a new one will do the trick? I made some changes, but I’m not sure if the old ones are going to be affected or not…
I’m going to let this bake to see if something changes while I have lunch. I’m thinking this may be on gravatars side after all, but I can’t say that for sure…
Test Test Test
Just wondering should the image come up in the live preview?
No, it won’t show in the live preview.
I’m going to contact Gravatar to see if they have any ideas. I tried everything I could find on their site, and BlogEngine.net’s site as well.
This one is baffling me, but I’ll get er fixed…
This does not make Gravatar look good at all…
Sorry guys! I tried!
Demeur you can give it a try on my blog. I stay say it is a cache issue.
Think they got the problem fixed. It works over at Roses’.
Oops I spoke too soon.
@Demeur – What did their support say?
Demeur, I see it’s working here now.
That’s great.
Demeur, did anyone from the company contact you? They never let on what the issue was to me. I’m still in the dark, but I guess it was on Gravatar’s end.
This is not how I expected my greatest commented post to go down. hahahahaha
Thanks Rose for doing some testing on your end. Much appreciated!
By the way, that’s a freaky image…like it!
My pleasure Wayne. I’m just glad he got it working. Have a nice day.
Again informative post.
Hopefully mine shows up. Thanks again!!
Me too. Thanks.
@Tiffany – Looks like it!
Alright, here’s an update from Gravatar. It is due to caching that your pictures may or may not show up. However, giving time to allow the cache to refresh, your picture will eventually show up. Here’s the response I received:
[quote]I also see your recent wrap-up post in which you note the likelihood that this is a caching issue. You’re correct. We are constantly working on our caching policies to make them more friendly for our users. It’s a complicated dance with several levels of caching from our caches, to ISP proxies to the browser cache itself. We’ll be putting a lot of work into this area over the next few weeks to significantly reduce the amount of time spent waiting for a gravtar change to show.
It’s likely, though, that this will not ever get down below 5-10 minutes.[/quote]
It’s nice to know there are companies out there that will take time to respond to inquiries when their users ask them. Thank you Gravatar.com for the assist! We are all looking forward to your improvements when they come out.
This will be helpful to those of us with the same error on our blogs. Thanks Wayne.
Thanks, I thought there would be others in the same boat too. I currently have a hateful looking cat for a gravatar and I’m ready to get rid of it. This is part two of the test, which this has turned out to be. How long will it take the cache to reset so I can have my other cat back?
Perhaps I’ll make a new gravatar all together at this point…
Two days to get my road kitty back. I wonder how much my own cache is playing a part of this. I’ll have to look at that angle too…
Thanks for the tutorial. Let see if this works…
@NappyKitchen – Hey, look at that, it worked! Well I’ll be…
Was that the first image you uploaded and then tested, or did you upload multiple images and then test it? I think that would be interesting to note as it might reveal a bit about the cache issue.
Thanks for giving it a go! Cheers!
@Wayne – It was the first and only image that I uploaded. Hope that helps.
It may. I’ve seen issues with images not showing, and knowing if they were the first or second could help to id an issue. Thanks for getting back to this! Happy Friday!
Why no gravatar? I have NO patience with techy stuff…and this is under that category
Maybe I’ll coerce dh into doing one.
Oh, that’s a cop out.
Coerce away! That’s one thing he’s there for right? hahaha
There are some good avatars here:
http://mediaicons.org/Browse.aspx?format=1&rated=4
Thanks for dropping that Jarrett!
I noticed that you are building a blog engine. I’ll be interested in watching what comes of that in the future.
If you can get themes to be “find one, use one”, point and click easy, you’ll get a ton of users converting from other systems where the templating requires some knowledge of CSS and HTML. Good luck!
Like your post man…and love little kitty!!