matthewwhitworth.com

• Published:January 23rd, 2008
• Comments:No Comments
• Category:Diary, Meta, Tech

For some unknown reason, I got vaguely interested in Gravatars this week. I’ll spare you the Google search — Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. (And for you total lame-os, avatars are the little pictures next to people’s names in some forums and blog comments.) The idea is that you upload your avatars to gravatar.com and associate them with your email address (which just happens to be a globally unique identifier that you’ve probably already provided to most systems you use), and then services that are configured to use Gravatars can always pull your latest and greatest avatar from a central repository. Rocket science it ain’t.

First, I set up a couple of Gravatars myself: one rated PG (I’m holding a beer), another rated G of me playing the ukulele at Ian and Christine’s wedding party. I’m not sure why I bothered as I don’t really post to any forums these days, but they’re there.

Next, I spent about three minutes setting up the Easy Gravatars WordPress plugin over on Kid Amnesiac. Man, does Easy Gravatars live up to its name! Not much flexibility, but a default setting that was perfect for my needs. (The only tweaks I made were to change the URL for the default image for missing Gravatars to one being served off my own server and then to set the default maximum-naughtiness rating to PG.)

Here’s the kicker: not a single person who has posted comments to Kid Amnesiac has a Gravatar. I checked ’em all. Nothing. I even posted a comment myself (since deleted) just to see if the plugin worked (it did). I figured at least one person (*cough* Diana *cough*) would have a Gravatar. Nope. None. So that was a bummer.

I’m leaving the plugin enabled in hopes that someone might read this and go nuts and actually set up a Gravatar. Please, make me feel useful. Oh, and I suppose I should set the plugin up for matthewwhitworth.com, too.