Avatars and gravatars tip: how to get one

Today I thought I’d post a tip on how to get one of those cute little square pictures of yourself that show up with your comment in any blog or forum.

Because it’s really easy to do, and it’s so much nicer to see a face instead of a computer-generated icon or a blank spot alongside your comment.

What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, or on any site.

Here’s all you do:

1. Visit https://en.gravatar.com and sign up – it’s free. All you need is your email address.
2. Once you’ve signed up, you upload your avatar image by following the instructions to browse your hard drive and locate the image you want to use.
3. Then use the little resize doo-hickey (that’s a technical term) to drag the arrows to select the area of the image you want to use for your gravatar. I used the entire image I uploaded because I’d already cropped and trimmed it in Photoshop. But you don’t have to do that, you can select any part of an image you upload.
4. Soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar-enabled sites (like this one)!
5. You can associate the image with multiple email addresses if you want to.
6. You can also go back to your account and change your image any time you feel like it. Like if you get a better hairdo, for instance. Or a facelift.

Twitter Gravatar Tip

Note that this gravatar service does not apply to Twitter.

In Twitter, you simply go to your account Settings link, then click on the Picture tab. Then use the “Browse” button to search your hard drive and locate the image you want to use for your Twitter account. Best to use a 72 dpi image or Twitter seems to get confused.

Hope this tip helps!

Cheers, and expect good things.

Recommended Reading: Twitter 101: Getting Started and How to Tweet