I upgraded to Wordpress 2.5.1 today, and it was my first upgrade since I made this blog. I kind of needed to update it soon, so I thought now would be a good time since I had just upgraded my computer with Ubuntu 8.04 and my Spring vacation is about to end.
Wordpress 2.5.1 comes with built-in support for gravatars—globally recognized avatars. Since the last time I visited that website, they’ve been acquired by Automattic, the company that maintains Wordpress, which was a bit of a surprise to me. It used to be really slow and unreliable, but thanks to Automattic that’s no longer the case, at least relatively speaking. As the theme I’m currently using, Rustyfied, is a fairly old theme, I had to modify it to add gravatar support. After quite a bit of trial and error with the site’s CSS, it works perfectly. Just go to Gravatar’s website and sign up, then use the same e-mail you register with there when making comments here, and your avatar will show up. Do the same on other blogs or websites that have Gravatar support, and the same avatar will show up there. If you ever want to change your avatar, you can do so on the Gravatar website, and the changes will be reflected on all of the websites you’ve posted on using that e-mail address. You can even add multiple e-mail addresses to the same Gravatar account. 
Remember to rate all of your gravatars the same (hopefully G) because, for example, if you set a PG rated avatar to blahblahblah@example.com, then you change that avatar to a G rated one, all the websites that you posted on with the PG rated avatar won’t reflect that change and will still display your old avatar. This is because Gravatar attaches “r=RATING” to the end of the URL for the image you use, so “r=PG” will result in your old PG-rated image being displayed, while r=”G” will result in your new G-rated image being displayed. Thus the sites won’t update your avatar when you change it if your avatars have different ratings, and by default only G-rated avatars are displayed on Wordpress blogs so it’s a good idea to only use G-rated avatars.
u bring up a vey interesting point. ths would prove very useful to my wayful wandering. My afflictions with the numerous sites i have visited in my life leaves behind …u could say… avatars that would not be suitable for an adult as i am. So in all humbleness…thank u for sharing such practical information
As an aside, if you didn’t see the latest Gravatar news item, you can assign automatically generated icons as people’s default avatars rather than displaying the default Gravatar by specifying a default of identicon, monsterid, or wavatar. They haven’t added them to the help docs yet though.
I had seen it, but I was a bit unsure of how to set it up. Albeit, I didn’t put much effort into it at the time because I was busy trying to fix the stylesheet for the site.
“Anonymous” bystander, you really need to try to make your comments more clear. xP
it took me a few minutes (and reading the WP code) to figure out exactly what it wanted. If you are using the get_avatar function, you just need to add a third argument with the name of the alternate icon type.
get_avatar(get_comment_author_email(),50,'identicon');Thanks a bunch! I’m a newbie with PHP, so I wouldn’t have been able to figure that out on my own.