Gravatars...

... or Globally Recognisable Avatars are simple means of identifying a user on your site. What makes these better than standard avatars is they follow you across the internet, where ever you go. Adding support for them to your own site is really simple.

If you don't already have a gravatar, creating one is really simple - add your email address http://en.gravatar.com/site/signup and then upload your avatar to the system. If you use multiple email addresses, you can add more to your account really easily so they share your gravatar.

Now, for the interesting bit... how to use them, you should already have the users email address (via registration or filling in a form while submitting data), with this you need to md5 hash it and then add it into the URL.

For example, my email hashed turns out to 3afc7011e3a1525f416887498a50d1ac so my gravatar url is http://www.gravatar.com/avatar/3afc7011e3a1525f416887498a50d1ac this allows us to load an image with this as the url.

Extra options can be added, for example, adding a query string (?) followed by some options, you can control the size. ?s=64 would give a 64 pixel wide and high gravatar.

Really Simple!