Update: Now I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.5.1, the plugin mentioned here is no longer used here, as I’ve mentioned in Wavatars Revisited. It’s still pretty cool, though. So if you’re using an older version of WordPress, check it out.

Now this is fun…

First, some background. I’ve been using Gravatars (Globally Recognisable Avatars) on this site for, ohhh, a long time. Back to the early version of the service that used to fall over a lot. Well, not that long ago, the Automattic people bought the Gravatar project, and they’ve been busily improving it, first with more resilience and then by building it into the most recent version of WordPress. With the improvements, a lot of people who’d previously been using a plugin to deal with Gravatars on their sites found they could do without them altogether, and just use a teeny bit of code. I meant to look at that, but never found the tuit, what with the plugin working quite well for me and all.

Oh, hold on. Some of you are looking at me a bit strangely[1]. You have no idea what I’m going on about, have you? OK. A Gravatar is an icon you can use to represent yourself on websites. If you sign up at gravatar.com and upload an image, then whenever you leave a comment on a site that supports Gravatars, your picture will appear next to the comment. It’s all harmless fun, and you can read all about it on the Gravatar Blog.

But what happens if you leave a comment and you don’t have a Gravatar? Well, up until now, your comment would have been marked with a rather dull default icon. But no more! My WordPress dashboard alerted me to this interesting post on that Gravatar blog I mentioned in the previous paragraph:

Identicons, MonsterID’s and Wavatars! Oh My!

This talks about the latest improvements to Gravatars, and how they’ve incorporated the features of some plugins that can create icons for commenters who don’t have gravatars. Well, as I’m not running WordPress 2.5 yet[2], I can’t have automagic inclusion of the new stuff, and I can’t be bothered to edit lots of code, so I had a look at the plugins. They all do different things to generate the images, and the one I liked the best was Wavatars. It creates an image from a load of components according to some magic mathematics based on the email address entered. So if you leave comments on more than one site that uses Wavatars, you’ll always be represented by the same picture. It’s just like having a Gravatar, except you don’t get to choose the picture.

If you do have a Gravatar, you’ll continue to see it next to your comments. If you don’t have one, feel free to leave a comment and see your exciting picture!

[1] More so than normally, that is
[2] Mostly just waiting for a plugin to be updated