You may have noticed in the comment sections of each Edit and Post post that some comments have photos and others have the default avatar.

Well, as much as I love the cute little red pen, I want to see you!

WordPress by default supports photos in the form of Gravatars, or globally recognized avatars. It takes about 30 seconds to sign up for a Gravatar.

Simply:

• Click here
• Input your email address
• Click on the link in the confirmation email
• Create a Gravatar username and password
• Import a photo of yourself and crop it as desired
• Add as many other email addresses to your account as you like

And voila, the next time you comment here (or on any other WordPress blog with avatars enabled), we will get to put a face to a name.  Yay!

PS – If you are the owner of a WordPress.com blog, or have a WordPress blog installed on your own server and use the Akismet or WordPress Stats plugins, you can sign into Gravatar with your existing WordPress.com username and password, which makes the process even simpler.

PPS – For those of you who have WordPress blogs already (or will be installing them soon after reading the Building Your WordPress Blog post series), I will be doing a post on styling comments to include avatars in a few weeks.