Y’know that little image that appears next to posts in forums, and against comments on blogs, and in lots of other places where people post messages? Well, it’s called an “avatar”, and it seems there are still a helluva lot of people who don’t know how to get themselves one.
Dictionary.com provides four meanings of the word “avatar”.
- Hindu Mythology. The descent of a deity to the earth in an incarnate form or some manifest shape; the incarnation of a god.
- An embodiment or personification, as of a principle, attitude, or view of life.
- Digital Technology. A graphical image that represents a person, as on the Internet.
- (in science fiction) A hybrid creature, composed of human and alien DNA and remotely controlled by the mind of a genetically matched human being.
Our concern here is the third instance, and the most common use for an avatar on the Internet is a thumbnail picture of a person making a comment. Take a look at twitter.com and you’ll see an avatar image against every post. Avatars are also in almost universal use on discussion and support forums.
Unlike most forums, Twitter requires that you upload an image to your Twitter profile, and that image is used for all your posts on the Twitter platform. But avatars wouldn’t be used nearly as much as they are across the web if you had to upload your image separately to every website that uses them.
Enter Gravatar
Gravatar is an online service that associates an image with an e-mail address, and happily a vast number of websites are Gravatar-enabled.
What this means in short is that whenever you enter your email address at a Gravatar-enabled website, your thumbnail image will appear automatically.
All you need do is establish a free Gravatar account, upload your image, and associate that image with an e-mail address. It only takes a couple of minutes. If you have more than one e-mail address you can associate the same or different images with different addresses.
This website, like squillions of others, is Gravatar enabled. If you post a comment on this website, and you DO NOT have an image registered at Gravatar, then your published comment will look like the first one below, with a default blank image.
But if you do have a Gravatar account set up then your post will look like the second one below, where my attractive visage is is presented for your admiration.
= Two example forum comments =
How to do it
It’s really simple…
- Prepare an image, preferably a head & shoulders portrait shot against a plain background, and save it to a convenient location on your computer (e.g. the desktop).
- Browse to https://secure.gravatar.com
- Click “Log in/Sign up”
- When asked, enter your e-mail address, or one of your addresses.
- Gravatar will send an e-mail to the address you entered. There will be a link in that e-mail message that you must click to enable your Gravatar account.
- Having clicked the link that Gravatar sent to you, you will now be back at their website. From there on its just a matter of following the very simple instructions.
That’s all there is to it. In future whenever you use that e-mail address on a Gravatar-enabled website, the associated image will be displayed.
Why would you want to do this?
Well, it is reasonable to assume that if you make a post to a website, you would like it to be noted and in all probability you would like to receive a response. And it has been well established that personalised messages received more attention than those that appear more anonymous. This is particularly important when you are seeking assistance in a User or Support forum.
It can also fool the general public into thinking that you actually have a few clues about using the Inter Web!
