HOW TO ADD YOUR PICTURE TO YOUR ONLINE COMMENTS

May 17, 2008

The 80 million or more blogs in existence provide the framework for a worldwide conversation. The interaction is so much richer and more people-oriented, rather than machine-oriented, if a face goes with the words.

Large portions of human brains are concerned with face recognition. Within the first few minutes of looking at a web site, I’m on the About page searching for the face. It’s amazing how much we learn about a person from looking at their face, and also from what face they choose to present.

Add texture to your words by including your picture with comments you leave online. People will get to know you so much faster.

Avatars and Gravatars

Your avatar is just a picture of yourself. Rick Beckman, who blogs at Kingdom Geek, has a gift for explaining complicated things in simpler ways. He describes it well in this post about adding avatars to your blog.

A Gravatar is a Globally Recognized Avatar. You’ll see many examples of them here at the Gravatar. Your Identity Online site.

Mine looks like this :

Did you notice what Rick wrote about Gravatars showing up on comments you’ve made in the past? Or how you can change your Gravatar, in case you grow your hair out or decide you were wearing the wrong color and your skin looks green? Rick may be a 25yr old male but he was clearly thinking of womens’ priorities when he shared that info with us.

Gravatars show up with your comments if the website you’re commenting on has them enabled. That’s up to the site owner. The commenter has no control over it.

But you don’t need to own a web site to have a picture included with your Comments. Anyone can do it.

How To

It is the simplest process. Click “Sign up now” at the Gravatar site. Enter the email address that you want associated with the picture (the one you give when you leave comments). They’ll send a link to your email that you just click and can then create your image.

Upload any picture of any size in the box they show you. There’s a very cool little cropping device built in so you can set your picture however you like. If you don’t want it to be your face, make it something else… a cartoon of your face, your kayak, whatever makes you think of you.

Rick - if you’re reading this - does it matter what size people crop their picture to ? Does the blog theme control that, where my default size is set to 96, but my own picture is 80?

Very easy, very cool. Makes you look in-the-know – or is it in-the-now?

Posted by Christine Scaman | Filed Under Love My Computer

Comments

4 Responses to “HOW TO ADD YOUR PICTURE TO YOUR ONLINE COMMENTS”

Rick Beckman on May 17th, 2008 8:46 pm

Christine: No, it doesn’t matter what size a picture is when you upload it, though keep this in mind.

If I uploaded a 20×20 image of me as my gravatar, it will appear ugly and stretched on sites with avatars set to 80×80.

However, if my uploaded image is 500×500 and I don’t crop just a small portion of it out, then my avatar will look good on sites with avatars set at just about any size.

Thanks for the link back to Kingdom Geek & the kind words.
Christine Scaman on May 18th, 2008 7:22 am

Thanks for the reply, Rick.
So you’re saying that folks can crop their picture to any size over 80×80 which is about the smallest you’d want to look at , or even leave it very large, and it will be adjusted to whatever dimension the site they’re commenting on calls for?
If my blog theme is set for 96, as you know, but the picture I uploaded is 80, shouldn’t it appear stretched out a little? Or does the blog make them all 96 if they’re larger than that, but leave anything smaller as is?
Christine Scaman on May 18th, 2008 7:23 am

That must be it because your picture is slightly larger than mine, right?
Rick Beckman on May 18th, 2008 4:05 pm

Actually, Christine, you can test this out real easy; you say your uploaded avatar was only 80 px?

At 80, it’ll look like this:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/dadc4a075213f0ae6942768eb234f49e?s=80

In this theme, we’re stretching them out to 96:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/dadc4a075213f0ae6942768eb234f49e?s=96

Maybe somewhere has it set to 500:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/dadc4a075213f0ae6942768eb234f49e?s=500

80-100 pixels, the distortion/pixelation of the image isn’t terribly noticeable, but once at 500, well, it’s obvious you uploaded a small avatar. Of course, mine is not much better at that size:
http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/358289179c159bfc4661ab4e6b16f1fc?s=500