Blog Exercises: Gravatars

This Blog Exercise will help you update your global recognition on WordPress and all Gravatar-enabled sites.

I’m going to let TimeThief of one cool site, a site dedicated to all things WordPress blogging, tips, tools, and tutorials, explain Gravatars in her post, “Gravatars for Global Recognition.”

Whether you blog under your real name or under a pseudonym you may not be able to register the same username on every site you join. You can make it easy for others to locate you and your connections by using a specific graphic icon to identify yourself and your branding on all sites across the Internet. So why not register your own Gravatar?

Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars integrated into WordPress that follow you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things like comment or post on a blog. Gravatars help identify your posts on blogs, social networks, wikis and forums by distinguishing you from other users. Replace the generic Gravatar image with the image of your choice and you are good to go.

Gravatar stands for Global Avatar, an image that represents “you” across the web on any site with Gravatars enabled. By default, all WordPress sites recognize Gravatars. A few years ago, there was a growing trend towards recognizing and displaying Gravatars on Gmail and many other contact form and social media sites. While some social media and blog services require you to upload your own image, many are taking advantage of the easy to use Gravatar API, including Electronic Arts’ Battlefield 3 Game and other role-playing and multiple player games.

When you leave a comment on any WordPress blog, include the email address associated with your Gravatar image and your face, logo, or representative graphic will appear next to it.

The Gravatar image is associated with your email address. You may have more than one email and more than one Gravatar image associated with each email address.

WordPress.com and those with Gravatar Hovercards enabled display an abbreviated version of your Gravatar profile when the user hovers over the Gravatar image on a comment image, instantly giving people more information about the person behind the image.

Images used by Gravatar can be sized up to 2048 pixels, making the images ready for higher resolution devices and retina-ready devices.

Gravatars are now localized with translations for 43 languages.

Your blog exercise today is to register your Gravatar or update it and your Gravatar profile.

If you are a WordPress.com member, go to Users > Your Profile and set up your Gravatar image through the graphic at the upper right.

If you are on a self-hosted or managed version of WordPress, or not on WordPress at all, go to Gravatar and register your email with an avatar image.

Go to Gravatar and click on the Account link to edit your Profile. You may add a variety of images, your resume, links to your sites, and a custom background image. As your Gravatar profile could link to you from thousands of WordPress and other sites, make it represent you well.

Remember to include a hat tip link back to this post to create a trackback, or leave a properly formed link in the comments so participants can check out your blog exercise task.

By the way, TimeThief of one cool site is one of the fantastic volunteers on the WordPress.com Forums. Her blog is dedicated to serving beginning, intermediate, and WordPress.com bloggers and site owners. I have recommended her advice for many years. Much of it is better than my own!

You can find more Blog Exercises on Lorelle on WordPress. This is a year-long challenge to help you flex your blogging muscles.

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