Blogs are simply awesome for building a community. There is innate two-way communication to you posting something and others offering their two cents by way of comments. That sense of community, though, is enhanced when you can SEE them.

Gravatars are “globally recognized avatars”. It is a little photo which represents the user which can be used across the Internet to represent that person. Gravatars are very common on blogs.

How To Get a Gravatar

If you do not have your own gravatar, go get one. You can do that at the official Gravatar website. It works based on your email address. So, essentially, you upload a photo and it is associated with your email. Wherever you have a profile that uses the same email address, that photo can be used to represent you.

Why Should You Use a Gravatar?

My recommendation is that you now only have gravatars display on your blog, but that you ensure you have your own.

From a branding perspective, having an avatar which is consistent across the web as representing you enhances your brand. Wherever people see that, they will associated it with you and your brand. I like to use a photo of myself. A picture says a thousand words, as they say, and I think people being able to see what you look like makes for a stronger connection than just an anonymous name.

If you are trying to build up a business brand, I recommend you use a logo of some sort for your gravatar. If you are trying to build your personal brand, you might want to use a photo.

From the blogger perspective, using gravatars enhances the sense of community. It turns comments into statement by real people. It enhances the sense of real community at the blog.

Integrating Gravatars on Your Blog

Gravatars haven’t always been trouble-free for bloggers. For a time, it was unreliable and bloggers would tend to remove them because the images wouldn’t even load properly. Then Automattic bought it (the same folks behind WordPress) and they provided the necessary hardware support to make it dependable.

The fact that Automattic now owns it, though, means that WordPress has gravatar support built-in. You simply need to enable it.

If you enable it and they do not appear, then it is likely because you are using a customized comment template for your theme that simply doesn’t include gravatar support. However, it is simple to add it. In your comments.php them file, just add the following template tag whereever you want the gravatar to appear:

<?php
echo get_avatar( $id_or_email, $size = ’96′, $default = ‘<path_to_url>’ );
?>

How do you use this in practice if you’re not a PHP nerd? Well, if you look at your comments.php file, you will probably see what is called a FOREACH loop. It will probably look like this:

<?php foreach ($comments as $comment) : ?>

Everything under that and up to the endforeach comment gets repeated. This is what shows all the comments on your blog post. So, inside that loop, add the following command:

<?php echo get_avatar($comment,32); ?>

This will feed the $comment variable into the get_avatar() function and you’re telling it to output 32×32 avatar images. You can change that number if you want large images. In your WordPress control panel, you can dictate what the default image will be if the user doesn’t have a gravatar.

You will need to place HTML around this little line of code to make the gravatar merge with your site’s design.

So, that’s how you do it.

Do you use gravatars on your site?