What Is A Gravatar And How To Setup Gravatar Account

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In times one was afraid of giving his/her e-mail address on some blogs , forums ,and sites as he was afraid of spamming.

Tom Werner discovered the solution and what is known as gravatar. So what is a gravatar???

Gravatar short  for GLOBALLY RECOGNIZED AVATAR is aservice for providing globally-unique avatars. Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account.

To eliminate spam, e-mail addresses in gravatar are hashed with the Md5 cryptographic hash function.

Setting up an gravatar account:

It all starts when you sign up for a free account (and yes you do have to give a working email address as confirmation for your account setup is sent to it). Once you account is set up, you can upload your first avatar. Avatars can be uploaded from a hard drive, web address and even a webcam device. Once your avatar is uploaded, you will be asked to crop it (gravatar’s cropping tool is very flexible and easy to use) so it will look nice. After cropping and clicking on the “crop and finish!” button, a “select avatar rating” page will be shown. There you will be required to rate the avatar as one of the following:

rated gravatar is suitable for display on all websites with any audience type.

rated gravatars may contain rude gestures, provocatively dressed individuals, the lesser swear words, or mild violence.

rated gravatars may contain such things as harsh profanity, intense violence, nudity, or hard drug use.

rated gravatars may contain hardcore sexual imagery or extremely disturbing violence.

After selecting the rating  the following screen will appear and then click on the link “check this avatar” to get your confirmation and encrypted email-address.

For me it showed my encypted email id like this:

Address: emailid@yahoo.co.in

Hash: 2b3f0a93a608e3eb869554e46b3d71ad

http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/2b3f0a93a608e3eb869554e46b3d71ad?s=80

Why do we use gravatar????

Gravatar acts as a  personal representations (or pictures) which help to distinguish one user from the next. If every user had the same default image, chaos could result and everyone would blend into a one color oceaning softwares.

Gravatar plugins are built in most of the blogging softwares. Wordpress  above 2.5 holds it and Redmine web based project management application beginning  with 8.0

have inbuilt feature for this application

For lower versions of wordpress and readmine  we manually need to download and install plugins.