Gravatar

Written by Nicholas McClanahan

Thursday, 04 June 2009 00:00

Want to change your avatar image?

Across the site, we use Gravatar. The way it works is pretty simple: We do a one-way hash of the email address in your designer profile, forum profile, or comments, and send it to Gravatar. Gravatar can't figure out your email address from the md5 hash, but it can compare the hash to all of the accounts it has. If there's a matching account, it will return the avatar image associated with that account, Otherwise it returns a default image.

The benefit of Gravatar is in the name - it's a 'Globally Recognized Avatar'. You can change your avatar on Gravatar.com and you'll see the change on multiple sites And a lot of sites use Gravatar, so your avatar will show up automatically all the sites that use it.

A few folks already use Gravatar, like ChristheCarpenter, and me (nmcclana). If you've been wondering how to change your avatar, that's all there is to it!

Setup Your Gravatar »