Did you ever feel the need to make the internet a less anonymous place.

That is what avatars, often referred to as gravatars, are for.
Your avatar is your profile picture only that is not limited to a single account at a forum, a blog, a social networking platform or alike. Your avatar follows you on the internet. It can be recognized by others at all places where you actively participated by leaving a comment, making an entry, posting an article etc.

There are only two major requirements.
The first being that you have to create such an avatar image and publish it on the net.
The second requirement is that the platforms and websites you choose to participate on need to have avatars or gravatars enabled.

If that is the case you can start making the net a bit less anonymous.

Being a regular participant on the net you should have your own avatar image. You leave your footprints on the interet and make it easier for user sharing your interests to follow your lead.
More importantly, adding your profil picture to your content, be it an article, a blog post, a comment etc. reminds you and others that the internet and the quality material found on websites is created by humans for other humans. The purpose of the internet is not to create value for machines.

Did you ever wonder what the difference between avatars and gravatars is? Which one should you use and why?

Avatars and gravatars are the same thing. An avatar is an icon or a symbol. It is used to make the recognition of youself, your company, your group etc. easier.
A gravatar is an avatar created by setting up an account at gravatar.com and uploading an image to it. Gravatar.com is a service provided by Automattic the company that is also responsible for the creation of Wordpress.

Setting up your account at gravatar.com couldn’t be easier.
All You need to do is to visit gravatar’s website and click the Sign up now! link.
You don’t even have to be afraid of wasting a lot of time filling out forms and providing your personal data. All gravatar asks from you is your email address and there is a good reason for it.

Gravatar images are linked to your email address. Whenever you use the address you provided at gravatar.com posting a comment to an article, your email address will be recognized and your avatar will be displayed.

After gravatar’s relaunch even the use of multiple email addresses and gravatar images is possible. That gives you the freedom to use a specific image for one of your interests and other ones for other topics. You don’t have to work with more than one account.

How do you create an appropriate avatar image?

Avatars have a standardized size. The default setting is at 80×80 pixels. The largest version you should optimize your image for is 128×128pixels.
Keep in mind that it always causes better results to provide a larger image that is downsized than a small image that is enlarged.
This graphic shows you the different sizes most commonly used for avatars. They are 128×128, 80×80, 48×48, 40×40, 32×32, and 16×16 pixels.

The sizes 80×80 pixels (gravatars default size) and 40×40 pixels are the most common avatar sizes among Wordpress blogs.

After you have decided which image to use you should open the image file with photoshop or any other image editor software for resizing. Cut your image to be a square and resize it to 128×128 pixels. Store the image and go to gravatar.com to create an account or login to your already existing account.

All you need to do now is to upload the image and activate it for an email address. You will find all the options in the dropdown menu.

A nice feature is that gravatar.com allows you to rate your profil image. That way you can assure that your chosen images is only seen by a suitable audience. It is up to the website’s owner / admin to allow avatars of specific ratings.

Why isn’t your newly created avatar image displayed?

So far I have not encountered many problems with this service. Yet, there are some reasons why your image might not displayed next to the entry you just made at a blog or any other platform.

One reason could be that you were simply a bit too fast and the gravatar server is not ready with processing your account information. Normally this only takes seconds but you should allow it some minutes to complete its tasks. Simply reload the website where your avatar should be published after a few minutes.

If your avatar still isn’t visible you should check that you used the same email address for your entry as you did for your gravatar.com account. If you don’t, gravatar can’t establish the connection between your entry and your account.

A third reason for your avatar not to show up is that images with your chosen rating aren’t allowed by the website’s owner. You can’t influence this. The only way to work around it would be to use a second email address linked with an appropriate avatar image.

If you double checked that all of the above was done correctly but your image still isn’t there it might be time to find out whether the website you want to leave your footprint on actually has gravatars enabled. A lot of Wordpress themes have gravatars enabled by default but this is not mandatory.

I set up my own gravatar image and tend to change it from time to time. I recommend that you do the same and go to gravatar.com to create your avatar image. It is fun to see the people you connect with over the internet.

I’d like to start a little experiment with this article. If were inspired to create an avatar or were a gravatar user already I’d like to motivate you to leave a comment to this post to let me see who you are and start am avatar collection.

You’ll help making the internet a less anonymous place.

The last weeks have been incredibly busy. I’ve been working on multiple projects almost simultaneously. Take a look at the references section at the sidebar. You’ll find a list of websites I created or have worked on during the last weeks.

On 21st of July I opened a blog contest. The prize was and still is a complete business website set up by me. The initial idea was to keep that blog contest open until my RSS-FEED-subscription-counter would hit the 100 mark. You can find all the information about the contest as it was originally published here.

I lacked the time to really get into promoting my contest they way I probably should have. Therefore I’ve not reached that mark, yet. Since there have been people subscribing to my feed to enter this contest, who have been waiting for a while now I thought about an update to this contest. I feel that this would only be fair for the ones that have entered the contest already.

Here is the Update:

Instead of waiting until 100 of my readers and visitors have actually subscribed to my feed I will set a deadline for this contest.
This prize competition will officially end by the 31st of October 2008. No matter how many people have subscribed by then.

On the 1st of November all subscribers will be added to a database and I will have a php-script randomly pic a winner. The database will be deleted right after the winner has been picked. You needn’t worry about your personal data being stored anywhere without your notice.

The contest-winner will receive a confirmation email on the 1st. of November and there will also be a post about this at my blog.

I’m excited about finding a winner and starting to work on the webdesign project to follow.
If you haven’t entered the contest already make sure you do so before the deadline. Simply subscribing to my RSS FEED by email to participate.