Marco Luthe Online!

On some blogs, you might have already noticed an icon displayed before the author’s name in the comments area – a so-called avatar.

I always wanted to implement this feature on my blog, too – but I never really knew how this was done.

Actually, I thought that this would be a really difficult task.

Was each of those blogs hosting its own avatar system?

No – it is quite simple!

It turns out that some clever person already thought about this and created a website that hosts your avatar(s). The small avatar icons hosted there can easily be implemented on your blog via http-request that contains a unique hash of the author’s email (and some options).

Well, and because each avatar on that server is a globally recognized avatar, it is simply called a… Gravatar!

Plugins for several blog authoring systems are available that create the image URL for the “src=”-attribute of the “<img>”-tag.

• Official Gravatar website:
  site.gravatar.com
• Article about how to implement Gravatars on your WordPress blog:
  codex.wordpress.org/Using_Gravatars

Note:
It might be possible that the gravatars do not show up – I guess gravatar.com is experiencing some problems from time to time.

If it is working, you should see my gravatar on the next line: