Everybody lies

There was a bit of confusion about them, so I thought I’d better post a little explanation about this new feature here:

Since I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 I have enabled gravatars in the comments, which means that beside every comment you write here, your designated gravatar picture will appear.

If, that is, you have an account on Gravatar.com and have specified a picture there.

Gravatar stands for globally recognized avatar. It is simply an avatar image (much like in forums) that can follow you from weblog to weblog, if the site has gravatar support enabled. And since that option is now included in the standard WordPress software for version 2.5 and up, I think we will see these little images pop up on more and more blogs in the future.

You can even set up a different gravatar for different email addresses you use, so that you can have different pictures showing up beside your comments in different blogs. For myself I am currently using a picture of River Tam from the movie Serenity: (So, no, this is not what I look like, unfortunately.)

If you don’t have an account on gravatar.com yet (why not?), my server can obviously not show a specific picture for your comments. Which is a pity, I know. Instead, it would usually show a default picture, namely this one:

I think we all agree that this looks pretty boring. Well, even if you don’t agree, I still think it’s boring, which is why I changed it to this one:

This, just in case you live in a cave or something, is a picture of Wentworth Miller from Prison Break. There’s no special reason behind me using this particular icon, besides the fact that I think he looks cute and I liked the thought of having his picture appear on my blog almost every day.

But if, for whatever reason, you don’t like your comments to be associated with his picture (or any other one I might choose for that purpose in the future) there is an easy way out: you can just sign up on gravatar.com and specify your own picture there. It’s free, it’s easy, it doesn’t take more than 2 minutes and I think it’s fun.

And, no, this is not a sponsored post.