Lake Neuron

Many different web sites, bulletin boards, blogs, instant messaging programs and what have you encourage you to post an image avatar or buddy icon of yourself — some people use a photo, others, citing privacy concerns, use a cartoon avatar or some other image.

Gravatar (for Globally Recognized AVATAR) is a site which proposes to help you keep these images straight. You upload your chosen avatar (photo, cartoon, logo or what have you) and associate it with a particular e-mail address. Then, whenever you register with, leave a comment at, or otherwise log into a Gravatar-enabled site using that e-mail address, that site queries Gravatar and automatically retrieves your avatar of choice, without you having to upload it each time. If you want to change your avatar, to reflect your mood or situation, you can do so at any time, quite easily, and it will automatically be updated at all of the different Gravatar-enabled sites where it’s being used.

You can have a different avatar for each e-mail address if you like.

This is one of those ideas that could be really successful or could fall flat on its face, depending on whether it achieves the critical mass needed to make it an Internet standard. If web sites don’t enable Gravatars, there won’t be any benefit to the user.

However, working in Gravatar’s favor is that it was just acquired by Automattic, the people behind WordPress and Akismet. I assume that Gravatar is likely to be closely linked to future updates of WordPress. WordPress creator Matt Mullenweg has recently enabled Gravatar for the comments on his site, which is not surprising since he just bought the company. I have also enabled Gravatar for the comments here.

As Art just pointed out to me, Akismet — the comment spam fighter for all WordPress.com hosted blogs and for many people who have WordPress in self-hosted installations — seems to have spammed some legitimate commments over the weekend. I just got through sifting through 270 or so spam comments; I found and recovered one legitimate comment from Art and another one from my sister, but it’s possible I might have missed some. If you left a comment over the weekend and it never showed up, please accept my apologies and know that it wasn’t anything I did.

I am currently using a release candidate of WordPress 2.3, which is the first version of WordPress to have built-in support for tags. (There were plug-ins available for previous versions.) I had to manually update my theme so that it actually displayed the tags, however, and I’m using a plugin to help organize and work with the tags a little bit.

Anyway, this was about as good a discussion as I’ve seen of the difference between tags and categories.

If you find there are categories you’ve set up using WordPress which are really specific enough to be tags, 2.3 has a very handy feature that lets you selectively convert whichever categories you like into tags, while leaving the rest as categories.

Tagline Randomizer apparently doesn’t work with either of the beta versions of WordPress 2.3 which have been released so far.

So you’ll have to satisfy yourself with manually updated taglines until the situation changes.

I upgraded to the beta version of WordPress just now — and accidentally deleted my wp-config file. So I had to recreate it, and couldn’t find the password for my SQL database. I finally ended up creating a new user.

I have to leave now, so I won’t get to tinker with the new version until later.