Do you want to date my Gravatar?

[macdobhran]

No, I’m not trolling for dates online, nor am I performing a music video although Felicia Day’s video was the inspiration for the post title.

No, this post is about Gravatars.  What is a gravatar, you ask?  It’s a picture that represents you that is stored on the gravatar.com server.  It’s associated with whatever email address you sign up with so that when you post a comment to a gravatar enabled website or blog, like this one, your picture automatically shows up. Make sense?

The first thing you want to do is find a picture you like to use as your gravatar.  Next, go to http://www.gravatar.com and click the Get Your Gravatar Today button.  Then enter your email address.  You can use your main email address or create a junk email address just to associate with your gravatar if you don’t like getting emails from websites.

The system will send you an email to that address with an activation link. Just click on the link, a new browser window (or tab) will open up asking you to choose a username and password.  You can click the Check button to verify that your preferred username is available.  After you enter the information you’re ready to upload your picture!

Click on the words Add One By Clicking Here and the next screen will allow you to choose where you want to get your picture.  From there it’s pretty self-explanatory.  It doesn’t matter what file size of your picture is because Gravatar has some very easy to use picture editing choices.  Once you’ve edited your picture you’ll be asked to rate it using standard movie ratings.  This is because websites can limit which ratings they’ll allow to be visible on their site.

After that, you’re done! Now when you comment on a blog, for example THIS one, and you enter the same email you used to create your gravatar.com account, your picture will automatically show up next to your comment. Pretty cool, huh? So come on, go create your gravatar account and then comment here so I can see your happy, shining faces.

Originally published at Fast Food Zen. You can comment here or there.