I liked the idea of gravatars when they came out – mine was until recently an image of my right hand with the implant – but then for some reason it sort of dropped off the planet for me. No idea why. But now they are back (not that they left) and back in a better way. Like favicons though I like gravatars.

Unlike the amazingly boring and uninspirational M (I will change it later) that adorns the address bar here some favicons are little works of art. Completely constrained yet people can create wonderful images which can convey so much. Like gravatars. It surprises me at wordpress.com just how many people have their faces on their avatar there (but then it surprises me just how many people look at their stats too) but also the diversity. There’s a sticky thread just for testing avatars and while many are images taken from the web, images that are part of images taken from the web (looking at them now faces seem to figure higher than I thought. Maybe it’s a “I am a person not just a blog” thing going on) but there are some which look deliberately created. Created because nothing else fits, nothing else conveys the meaning they want to get across. And that’s really cool – especially to a person like me who has all the talent of a brick when it comes to art.

I tried to bring them into my comments at some point in the past but gave up with the styling for some reason or other. But I can and I probably will. There’s a support angle here though. There is a plugin at the gravatar site. and although it mentions WordPress 1.2 (I loved that version!) it probably still works. No doubt an uptodate version will appear. Anyway, there are many themes out there that have no gravatar code in their comments.php file and that means there are some issues ahead.
The gravatar help mentions the ‘Comments Loop’. The word ‘Loop’ used to throw people at the wordpress.org forums and although comment loops are probably fairly uniform it’s still a code insert. While there may be some hooks in the default themes – because hooks are good according to those that code – that will not do anything for existing users. So people will be going to forums saying ‘Loop?’ Soon after they will return saying things like “They overlap” “It broke the layout” “But I want them on the right/left/top/bottom?” “Instead of the author name” “drop shadow” and others too. The gravatar code does not specify anything in the way of placement, and neither should it. But people want their placement. And that’s where the fun starts. It’s adding a significant chunk of something that needs it’s own div, margins and all that other styling stuff. Forums will get busy and probably unavoidably so.
It’s not just a WordPress thing. It’s all the platforms – unless code is there waiting then code needs inserting and CSS writing. As gravatars become more popular then more people will ask “How?” and when someone asks, someone needs to answer (I know all about that bit). Maybe theme authors will produce something, not that they have to, but I can imagine they will be asked. The forums might keep known solutions. Again it’s not just the wordpress.org forums but others too. Possibly theme authors start to code this in by default and have the choices in the CSS – who knows.
None of this is bad, it’s just the effect that happens when something new comes along that lots of people want. And regardless of who actually bought it all the above would still apply.

And there are still some really good little pictures.

18 Oct edit:
Favicon now the same as my gravatar which is the same as my wordpress.com avatar.
Gravatars added. The gravatar is in a class which floats left and has a right margin of 10px.
The time/date is followed by br clear=”all”
The Author name is followed a br because I couldn’t be bothered to try any other way.