Creating your gravatar profile

- Even after editing the info on your profile view, there's still one element of your profile that is left unattended: your profile image or avatar. You can see it, or rather the generic avatar, in the top right-hand corner of the WordPress toolbar and you can also see it anytime you leave a comment on your site. So down here, where there's a comment, you can see that generic avatar. Here we encounter a rather interesting feature of WordPress. You see, your avatar image is not uploaded to WordPress or associated with your specific WordPress site or specific user profile within that WordPress site.

Instead, it's added to a free online service named Gravatar, a globally recognized avatar. This service associates an image and other information to your email address. Once you set up a Gravatar, your avatar image and other info will show up any time you leave a comment on a site that supports the service, so basically any WordPress site, or WordPress.com site. And this only works because the image is stored on this stand-alone service and it's not just tied to your site. So, let's set up a Gravatar and associate it with the email address you used to set up your WordPress site.

The first step in this process is to create an image you want to use, so here you see I have an image I'm going to use as my Gravatar. Then, go to Gravatar.com and click Create Your Own Gravatar. Then you're taken to a form where you get to set up a new account, and what you'll notice here is that you're creating a new WordPress.com account. If you don't already have a WordPress.com account, this will create a basic account, but it won't give you a blog or anything else you don't need, just makes you able to login. You can also use that account to sign up for Akismet or Jetpack or other services later.

If you have a WordPress.com account, you can also just login using that and then associate your new email address with your existing account and setup a Gravatar for it. If you're setting up a new account, just fill in the form, setup your email address, create a new username and a password, and click on Sign Up. This will generate a verification email that you need to respond to and then you'll be able to login. Now, I already have an account setup, so I'm just going to login here.

And once I'm logged in, you will immediately get this message. You can pick your email to modify because you can add as many email addresses as you want. And then it will say, "Woops, looks like you don't have any images yet! Add one by clicking here!" So I'll click on this link. From here i can either upload a new image, add an image from the web through a URL, pick one of my past uploads to Gravatar.com, or use my webcam to take a new photo. So I'm going to click Upload New, then choose a file. Go to my Desktop, find my graphics, and select this image.

And upload it. Next I'm taken to a cropping tool because if you don't have a square image, or you want to crop it in any other way, you can do it here. So I'm going to check my previews here to make sure that everything works and if it does, I'm going to click Crop and Finish. Then I have to set a rating for my Gravatar because you can upload images that are either R rated or X rated, but in this case I think my mug is pretty basic, so I'm going to set it to G. And that's it. Now I've associated a Gravatar with my image.

Now in addition to this, I should also go check out my profile. You see, with Gravatar.com you can actually setup a full profile, and that profile may show up when you leave a comment or something else on certain sites. So here I'm going to put in all my information. And I can also put in a nickname if I want to, so I'll set mor10, I'll set my location, and I can put in a short bio if I want to, but I'm just going to save the profile now. In addition to this, you can also add more information. You can set up a photo gallery with more images of yourself, you can set up a website that you're associated with, you can change the background for the Gravatar page that you create, you can set up contact information, verify external services like Twitter and Facebook and so on, and even hook up crypto-currencies.

But these are all thing you don't really need for our particular purposes. The whole point here is, once you go to my Gravatars now, you'll see that I have an image associated with an email address, and that mean if we go back to our WordPress site and reload the page, you should now see that image appear both in your comments and also in the WordPress toolbar. Now be advised, sometimes this takes a bit of time so you may have to do a couple of reloads or just wait a few minutes, but once it works it'll work across both sites where you've left a comment using that particular email. And the neat thing about Gravatar.com is, once you've created your Gravatar.com account, you can add multiple images and switch between them.

So for instance, if you want to have a different image for summer or winter, you can do that. And the other thing is, once you have created a profile like I have, you can actually go to Gravatar.com and then your profile name. So this is my public Gravatar. This is me, mor10, not the one I just set up now. And here you see, you have my bio, my verified services, they have some of the websites I'm associated with, and you can see a large picture of myself. So now, I have a landing page, both on Gravatar.com and on my own site.