What Is A Gravatar?

A gravatar, or avatar more commonly recognized, is a picture or logo that you use to brand yourself or your business.  This gravatar follows you from weblog to weblog appearing beside your name when you comment on sites.

Whenever you comment on a Gravatar enabled Wordpress blog, your gravatar will appear with your comment.  The Gravatar image is stored on the Gravatar server and is triggered by filling in your email address when you leave a comment.

Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an email address, the blogging software checks whether that e-mail address has an associated avatar at Gravatar. If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.

Using gravatars helps give our AZ Real Estate Blogging Network a more friendly and personal environment and we would encourage you to set up one up for yourself.  Remember you don’t have to use a photograph it could be just a unique image that identifies you.

The main reason for wanting a gravatar is to increase brand awareness - a picture of you or your logo is going to be seen and, hopefully, remembered by everyone who reads your comments.  Even if you don’t have a business or a brand, it is still a fun way to get yourself noticed in the blogosphere.

Here at www.AZRealEstateBlogs.com we actually have enhanced the gravatars and have used them for our author pages, side bar and tabber section with all our Writers. If you click on our writers gravatar it will take you to each author page and a small bio of each writer for our AZ Real Estate Blogging Network.

Gravatars are very basic to set up.  New users can register for an account by using their email address (or several email addresses), and upload your image to be associated with the account.  All to often the incorrect email address is used in the comment field and your image will not appear once you leave a comment.

When you own a gravatar and you are an active commenter on blogs or sites (that are enabled with gravatars) it’s very important that you plan ahead on what emails you will be leaving behind in the comment field. Remember the avatar recognizes the email address in your account.  If you don’t use the correct email address, then in it’s place it will be a default image, basically Casper the ghost!

Gravatars are very easy to set-up, here are the steps to set up a gravatar:

• • Sign up for a free account at http://en.gravatar.com/
  • Verify your email address by clicking on the link in the email you are sent
  • Choose a nickname and password (only lowercase letters and numbers allowed)
  • Upload a picture to the site from your hard drive or use an online image
  • Crop your picture to suit (slide the slider to the left to shrink your picture)
  • Choose a rating
  • Click on the image to associate it with the email address, it’s that simple!

Your gravatar will show up next time you comment here since we have Gravatars enabled on our Wprdpress blog.

Trouble Shooting  -  The two main reasons for a gravatar not showing up is:

a) You used upper case letters somewhere in your email address or the incorrect email address.
b) Your gravatar is stuck in the cache - if you email me at info@azrealestateblogs.com and I will clear the cache to see if this solves the problem. The blog’s cache is periodically cleared automatically so you can also wait to see if it shows.

So, are you ready to set up your Gravatar?

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