Bass Parade Avatars
The Shadow is cool...
When we launched BassParade last week we made sure to invite our readers to participate by posting comments. On a personal level, I’m satisfied with it because we’ve yet to receive any comments that begin, “Exactly how much crack have you been smoking?” or “You are wrong on so many levels it is hard to know where to begin…” – though I’m sure they’re coming, which is fine. Have at it, guys!
Anyhow, there’s another aspect to the whole comments thing that hasn’t been nailed yet. Here’s how you can “fix” it for yourselves.
...our default avatars are not.
I received an email from fellow BassParader Jason Bryant asking how to change a profile picture when posting to comments. Let me tell you folks something: When Jason Bryant asks how to do something on the computer, you can pretty much chalk that something up as being NOT user-friendly, otherwise it would already be done.
In light of this new information I thought it would behoove us to take a moment to discuss Avatars (your profile picture when you post comments—not the 3D blue people).
We're talking your profile image here...not 3D aliens.
Like many blogs, Bass Parade’s avatar system is based on Gravatars (Globally Recognized Avatars). The cool thing about gravatars is that you set it up once and the avatar will follow you around from site to site based on your email addy.
In other words, you set it up once and going forward many blogs, message boards and sites will automatically pick it up as well.
For example, I recently whimsically posted a comment on this cool Egg Timer Time Lapse Video, and as you can see my gravatar populated without me having to do any extra work.
To setup your own gravatar, all you have to do is visit http://gravatar.com and click on the “get your gravatar today” button. It only takes a minute, and by doing it you can have a cool pic associated with your name rather than a boring silhouette.
Category: BassParade
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Exactly how much crack have you guys been smoking! I don’t want a global avatar. I have one for my fishing life and prefer specific avatars for specific interests; such as music, politics, twitter, ect. Guess I’m stuck with this boring silhouette now.
I hear you mdtolic! I had the same dilemma and would like to offer a suggestion-
I have an email address I use for fishing sites, and a separate email I use for sites associated with my day job. (For example, I am currently signed-in for my day-job account and you can see my dorky work avatar.) Your avatar follows the email address, and using gravatar.com it is easy to setup multiple emails accounts.
You can get a free email address at hotmail, yahoo, gmail, and many others. (mdtolicfish at gmail dot com, mdtolicmusic at gmail dot com, etc…)
That is what I would do if you would like to use different avatars for different sites.
Thanks for participating! (and there is nothing wrong with keeping the silhouette if you don’t have time to mess with it.)
(hmmmm…now where did I put that pipe?)
The generic avatar actually bugs me. But having to create multiple email addresses bugs me more. That seems inconvenient, to be honest. But this is minor gripe. I’m so diggin’ the Bass Parade otherwise! Best new blog I’ve read in a quite a while. Love the Twitter updates as well.
Hey Bo, thanks for the link! BTW, we use a wordpress plugin to achieve both custom site avatars as well as the default integration with gravatars.
http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/add-local-avatar/
Great site, I look forward to seeing more.
Thanks for the heads up on the plug-in! Your site is pretty damn cool too…