As a web designer, I've long held the stance that it was better to have the visitors of your website upload the photo / picture of themselves to use for profiles and comments directly on your site ( local avatars).

I knew of many third party websites that with plugins allowed you to use a universal avatar, but making each of your visitors leave your site and sign up it's own set of problems. Plus there were lots of competing ones to choose, which third party service should you use? With the new release of Wordpress (the most popular online publihsing platform in the world) support for an globally recognized avatar (gravatar) is built right in.

This means more websites and more people from all over will be using gravatars. Since they're automatically enabled on the most up to date installations and easily upgradeable on the older ones, it's time for user profiles to comply and for sites to start asking visitors to signup and use gravitars. Besides wordpress (my CMS of choice), gravatars are also supped by

• Moveable Type
• Blogger
• LiveJournal
• Ruby on Rail systems
• Can be directly implemented in
  • PHP
  • Perl
  • Cold Fusion
  • Java
  • ASP
  • Python

Not to overload you with programming references, but basically Grvatars are gaining momentum and are being supported and pushed the major platforms online. It's time to start enabling it on all new websites and instructing your visitors to create a Gravatar they can use over and over again on all the sites they publish or comment on. Have you ever seen inappropriate profile images on the wrong sites? Gravatar allows users to rate their avatars from G to X. So you can specify what's acceptable to your audience. For example a string bikini pic may be PG 13 and a normal headshot G. In the dashboard of wordpress you can set the highest rating of gravatar that is allowed to display on your site. By default wordpress sets this at G, or appropriate for all audiences. For those of you who got deer eyed after reading the word "avatar", it means a graphical representation of a person, which is commonly used on forums, blogs and other websites where people interact. For you trvia buffs it became into use as an online representation of a person (in the cool "meta universe") in the cyberpunk novel Snow Crash (1992) by Neal Stephenson. What to do to get your gravatar now:

• Go to gravatar.com and click Signup now
• Add your e-mail address
• Upload an image
• Crop the image
• Choose a ratings for the image from G to X
• Assign each e-mail address an image

That's it your done! Now every comment you make on comment on a modern wordpress blog or another up to date website (like forums) you personal gravatar should show up letting the world now visually you were there. Everyday the web becomes a more colorful place.