Getting a Gravatar

One final thing that's worth discussing in this chapter is the matter of WordPress avatars. Although WordPress provides a number of possibilities in this area, the most popular one revolves around an external service—Gravatar. Gravatar started as a tool meant to provide people with the possibility to use the same profile picture (avatar) across the whole web. The name Gravatar actually stands for Globally Recognized Avatar.

What this means in plain English is that whenever you sign up with a web service, and if the service is Gravatar-compatible, so to speak, then it will pick your profile picture from Gravatar automatically, instead of forcing you to upload it manually from your computer. Apart from the profile picture, Gravatar also gives you a personal, online profile that anyone can see whenever he or she click on your (Gravatar) profile picture. Now, what does this all have to do with WordPress, right? Well, WordPress is one of those services and tools...