Gravatars are good – WordPress and other sites
Posted by John on August 18th, 2009
Good bits, and enabled here 
Learning – is good. As WordPress notes at the bottom right of their page : Code – is poetry.
What is a gravatar?
A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an image that follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?
Stay up to date with The Gravatar blog
How do I get a gravatar?
Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that’s required is your email address. Once you’ve signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar enabled sites!
How do I get gravatars on my site?
Setting up gravatars on your site is easy, you don’t even need an account! Plugins are available for leading blog software and content management systems, and our tutorials will have you running gravatars in no time. To request a gravatar from our servers, you simply add an image to your users activity with an “src” attribute that points to our gravatar image generator and includes an MD5 hash of the user’s email address. Since all gravatars are rated with an MPAA style rating, you can restrict your site to show only gravatars whose content you are comfortable with.
via the WordPress.org codex below : Using Gravatars « WordPress Codex.
What is a Gravatar?
Gravatars are Globally Recognized Avatars. An avatar or gravatar is an icon, or representation, of a user in a shared virtual reality, such as a forum, chat, website, or any other form of online community in which the user(s) wish to have something to distinguish themselves from other users. Created by Tom Werner, gravatars make it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web. Avatars are usually an 80px by 80px image that the user will create themselves.
Gravatars in blog post comments
A Gravatar is essentially the same thing, but they are all hosted on a single server and are called up by encrypting the users’ email address via the MD5 algorithm. So instead of having one avatar on one forum you visit, and another at a blog you visit, you could have the same avatar at both.
