A Word About Gravatars On This Blog

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.

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I usually don’t join such internet-wide things anymore, but I thought for this one I could make an exception. So, happy RSS Awareness Day everybody!

And if you have no idea what RSS is, follow the link or watch this cool video:

At least I hope so. Since renaming the first 9 pictures didn’t help I fiddled around some more, but embarrassingly it took me quite a while to get the idea to check the actual loadability of the single files. And what do you know, that turned out to be the whole problem. I just had to re-upload some of the pictures, because they apparently got damaged somehow during the FTP transfer and couldn’t be accessed anymore. Now everything should work as it is supposed to.
And no, even though I am a bit slow sometimes, I didn’t really take the whole day to figure this out. I actually spent most of the day outdoors, because it was one of those rare perfect spring days.

The ones among you who still actually visit my site and not read the blog in an RSS reader will have noticed it already: I have changed my theme again.

The theme is called Amazing Grace and it was made available by a guy named Vladimir Prelovac. And since I got really bored with Misty Look in the last couple of months, I am very glad I stumbled upon this new one. I have spent the last week customizing it on my testblog and I hope everything I fiddled around with is still working.

As you might have noticed there are rotating images in the header (48 different ones, to be precise). That is, most of the time they are there. Sometimes the graphics do not load on the first try and I have no idea why that happens or how I can stop it from happening. But I will keep trying to figure it out.

Anyway, apart from that little hitch I am very happy with this theme. I will go on tweaking some little things here and there (for instance the way smilies are displayed and the little category icons on the frontpage), but they will hardly be visible.

So what do you think? Do you like it?

Oh, and I also upgraded to WordPress 2.5., which went smoothly again - thank heavens. But the new dashboard still takes some gettin’ used to. But the good thing is, I’ve got a lot of nifty new plugins that make everything a little more sparkly. At least behind the scenes. LOL

I have just (finally) got around to updating my permalink structure to the proper format.
Yes, I am aware that it is a stupid idea to do that more than one year into the life of a blog, because all the outside links to this blog now went wonky within the blink of an eye - and I’ll let that be a lesson to me with my next blog, but I did it anyway. (Because, you know, to learn from your mistakes you first have to make some. So, there.)

I am spending too much time reading all those 180+ posts every day in my RSS reader anyway (Honestly, why do some blogs think it is a good idea to churn out up to 5 posts a day?), so I have become pretty ruthless in trimming the list of blogs I am subscribed to. Sometimes one post can be all it takes to make me say good-bye for good.

This is one of those. Irritating beyond belief (no pun intended).

Which is a shame, because back when I subscribed to it I actually liked to read this blog. But that was back when it was still about stuff, not about this bullshit religion. Ah well, I’m sure the guy won’t miss one measly reader, and a proudly atheist one at that. After all, according to his (faulty) “logic” I must be dishonest and self-delusional, because even though I am not really a scientist I still do “believe confidently that believing in God is foolish” beyond hope.

My time is just too limited to waste it reading and getting worked up about obviously wrong stuff like this:

There is plenty of good scientific evidence to support belief in God.

*sigh* Religious people keep saying that over and over, but I have seen NOT ONE piece of evidence for this opinion. I guess, one reason for this is that those people just don’t know the proper definition of “scientific evidence”. (Hint: just because it is written in your book of fairytales isn’t enough to call it evidence).

As promised earlier, here is the update on what I added to my sidebar instead of the Blogrush widget. It is a WordPress plugin by Sarah from StuffbySarah.net. Officially it’s called “What others are saying” and what it does is showing a list with links to the 5 latest posts by people from your personal blogroll. (I renamed it “Others say”, because that was short enough to fit in my sidebar.)

I know that this is not exactly the same thing that Blogrush did, because this obviously doesn’t bring in any traffic to my own page (not that BR ever did, either). It just gives visitors a chance to discover other blogs I like, plus it gives out some link-love to people whose writing I enjoy. Win-win as far as I am concerned, because offering my readers a chance to find interesting new sites was the main reason I installed BR in the first place.

Another thing I like about this plugin is, that I have total control over which websites it shows in this list. Well, since I have added more than 5 blogs to it and it shows only the latest 5 headlines, I guess the ultimate decision about who is shown depends on who updates most often. But at least I won’t have any spammers in this list, and no make-money-online blogs or any other crap I can’t really control.

When I have more time I will fiddle around a bit with the formatting to make it stand out a bit more, but for now this will have to do as I am just getting ready for the drive back to Leipzig.

Let me know what you think about this plugin, if you would ever click on such a list - and I wouldn’t mind if anybody could think of a better name for it (preferable not more than 3 words long).