Nice to have Gravatars Monday 2006-02-20
After long hesitation, as I upgraded my theme, I have finally come to the point of installing Skippys Gravatars plugin. This WordPress plugin makes it an easy task to add a more personal touch to the comments of your blog. Every commenter gets his or her personal global avatar next to the comment. It makes the readers feel a little more like a society and make the returning commenter feel welcome and at home. Let’s say it gives the comments area a more life like and less dry area. The images lighten up the place no doubt.
What must be done, except the download and installation of the plugin? It has an easily understood admin panel, where you can set different options for the plugin, such as the size of the image you want to integrate and whether you want to cache the Gravatas on your own site for faster downloading. You have to decide on where to place the image, normally in or beside the comment. This means you have to add some code, readily provided in the accompanying readme file, into your comment template. In your stylesheet you should add styling rules for the gravatar, likewise included in the readme.
But then your commenters have to do some work too! They have to go to gravatar.com and add their email address and upload a carefully selected image, that will be used on any blog where they comment. If one of your commenters doesn’t have a Gravatar, there image box will contain a default image at the bloggers discretion.
The standard default image is a question mark and if most Gravatars look like that on you pages, it may not look all that good.
I may change this to just a plain nice colored square, or not publish any image at all if no
Gravatar is associated with that persons email address.
It may sound careless to throw around email addresses like that, but have no fear it’s encrypted and only acts as an identifier for the image at gravatar.com.
So sign up with gravatar.com, upload your image and if you are a blogger, go get the Gravatars plugin and live happily thereafter.
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PetitOn Tellus
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Saturday 2006-09-02
Test comment. ( Much later as yo can see
It seems that the Gravatar is presented first after you write your comment. I’m writing this comment, to see if I’m greeted welcome back, on the next visit.
In that case it is dependant on a cookie.
Otherwise I suppose you have to be registered, to get that treatment.
Answer to that question in the next comment.
Saturday 2006-09-02
Well, after closing the browser and restarting, I’m now treated with my own Gravatar and the profile fields below filled in automagically.
That’s good, but I still miss the “Welcome Petit!” phrase.
Must be easy to do, as the Name field is filled in.
I’ll have to take a closer look at that.