Gravatar-enabled

The comments on this blog are now Gravatar-enabled. I didn’t use a plugin, just 2 lines of PHP. It’s pretty fascinating going through old posts and comments and seeing who has a Gravatar already. Do you have an account yet?

238 thoughts on “Gravatar-enabled

  1. “Do you have an account yet?”

    Why yes, yes I do. ๐Ÿ˜‰ I’m so glad to see you’ve picked up Gravatar. I’ve used the service for years, and always considered it a simple but pretty brilliant idea. Great to see it’s getting the attention it deserves!

  2. To see if it still works…

    I’ve had a grav account for a long time but disabled it when they went thru their upgrade/server change/2.0 thingy.

  3. I just recently removed Gravatars from my blog, as I thought no one used them still. Now that Automattic runs the show, I’ll have to put them back in.

  4. How about you show us newbs those two lines, eh?
    Apart from that … I was glad to hear that you guys had bought Gravatar. It’s a great idea and concept, and I’m confident that you and the rest of the Automattic team will make it even bigger and better.

  5. I’m assuming those 2 lines of code just do an image tag around the Gravatar URL for a person’s e-mail?

    That’ll work, the main difference with the Gravatar plugin is that it stores a local copy of the Gravatar to reduce the load on the Gravatar server. Users’ browsers will presumably cache the Gravatar once it’s loaded, so it’ll load once per user instead of once per site…

    I created a Gravatar account but never had any luck loading my avatar from the Gravatar site… I guess I’ll see if it loads on this post…

  6. Thanks for the code Matt! I just re-Gravatar enabled my blog — hopefully Automattic’s acquisition will lead to greater adoption of this great idea!

  7. “That’ll work, the main difference with the Gravatar plugin is that it stores a local copy of the Gravatar to reduce the load on the Gravatar server.”

    That’s only useful if you want to create more load on your server. The Gravatar server is or will be faster than yours could ever be and closer (lower latency) to your visitors. It will also update faster when someone updates their avatar.

    Jenny, MyAvatars looks very cool but once we plug in the WordPress.com avatars to the Gravatar API it’ll have more users than MyBlogLog or Gravatar ever had, combined.

  8. Hmm let me try it, i have wanted to add something like this to my blog but not too much of a code person any specific instruction on how to add that 2 lines of code i have seen the code but don’t know where to put it

  9. oh yeah! My tip: If you have kind of an “official” identity/email-address representing ore than one persons, use a screenshot thumbnail of that website as the gravatar.

  10. Woo hoo. Presumably with the new system for distributing gravatrs, there’s no need to use local caching to reduce load on the service? I’ll look at adding that code to my site – thanks ๐Ÿ™‚

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  12. I expect it’s on the todo list already, but it should definitely possible to resolve more than one email address to a single gravatar account/identity. I just created a gravatar account, and then immediately had to create another one when I realised it wasn’t the mail address I use on my blog. I suspect that when the WP and Gravatar datasets merge, I’ll wind up with three.

  13. Definitely works better than the unreliable plugin, and I can finally have customs for each theme, without having a fuckton of errors. ๐Ÿ™‚

  14. Thanks for the code, Matt!

    I just added it to my WordPress blog as well. Even though no commenting visitor of my site has a gravatar, it is still nice to see my own comments with my gravatar ๐Ÿ˜‰

  15. Thanks for the 2 lines Matt… But what’s your thoughts on caching the gravataar avatars? I also run the Gravataar2 plugin to do some caching, wouldn’t that be the suggested use?

  16. Ok, is working now, sorry! Thank Matt for the tip. I hope WordPress 2.4 can have this function integrated ๐Ÿ™‚ that would be rad.

  17. It’s that simple???? O.O I always assumed it was complicated by the look of the WordPress Gravatar plugins. I never knew it would only require 7 lines of code in the theme to enable Gravatars.

  18. Keen. I expect to see a much broader adoption of Gravatars now, with Automattic’s bully pulpit working in its favor. I think I’ve only ever had one comment from someone with a Gravatar ๐Ÿ™

  19. Apparently, my last comment offended …

    Sorry.

    Anyway, Gravatars are working now on my site. Looks nice.

    I do suggest some sort of support forum on the Gravatars page for those with questions, difficulties, etc.

  20. That’s wonderful. I’ve been hoping that Gravatar would work better in the future. Well, the future is now! That means I can finally enable it on my site, sweet.

  21. I really like the fact that you don’t have some sort of silhouette for those without gravatars. (Some folks are just too shy, and/or opposed to the focus on personality.)

  22. Gravatars seem to be really popular amongst the readers here. Few people on my blog have them and I’m thinking of going through and getting rid of the default silhouette pic so it’s not so cluttered. But it is pretty cool to see what people look like, or at least what kind of picture they choose to display. (I’m too lazy to actually stick a picture of myself in.)

  23. More importantly — now you have a Gravatar account, Matt. ๐Ÿ™‚

    And to Patrick Havens re: caching of Gravatars — the main reason for that was the horrible performance and downtime of the service in the past. Hopefully, that’ll be fixed now that Barry can work his magic and spread the service out over more than one server. Also note that if you’re caching them, you’ll be increasing hits to your own server as well as filling up HTTP pipes that could be used for other things (browsers limit concurrent HTTP requests by domain).

  24. This was just the motivation I needed to add this support to my sites. Thanks.

    I reviewed the different ways to integrate Gravatar support, including this way and using the Gravatar WordPress plugin, on my blog.

    I also updated the plugin to call strtolower on the email address and to add a function to get the Gravatar URI string. You can download it from my blog as well.

  25. It’s good news. But when I try to post a comment here, there is long list of comment. It’s make me see the negative site. Site with Avatar enable take time to download all Avatar. This make me re-thinking, should I enable Avatar on my blog?

  26. Sorry for the “me too”, but I just wanted to say w00t – gravatars are cool! Glad to see WordPress pick them up, and look forward to seeing them come to life now that they have some pretty major backing!

  27. Wonderful, this will add great value to my site. Will need it in another language to introduce my readers to it, though. (Wouldn’t mind helping translate)…

    For the future, I hope it will offer the ability to see all comments made by a user on my site, and ability to connect to other Gravatar users ๐Ÿ™‚

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