Today finds this site Gravatar enabled. What is Gravatar you ask? From the site: “A gravatar, or globally recognized avatar, is quite simply an avatar image that follows you from blog to blog appearing beside your name when you comment on gravatar enabled sites. Avatars help identify your posts on web forums, so why not on blogs?” So this is a good thing. Keeping identities unified across several different sites can be a tough job, OpenID helps with that with the login (which is why I run an albeit seldom used id server using Clamshell, and here’s my OpenID endpoint), and gravatar comes in to help with the image.
And how do you get one of these nifty “universal avatars”? Again, from the site: “Signing up for a gravatar.com account is FREE, and all that’s required is your email address. Once you’ve signed up you can upload your avatar image and soon after you’ll start seeing it on gravatar enabled blogs!”
So, just go to the site, you can click here, give them an email address, upload a picture, and you’re good to go! I thought this was such a good idea, I finally got around to signing up for a gravatar, and enabling it on NousEssence.
So, now I am all ready to go with Mollum stopping the spam comments, Gravatar up and running for identification, and notification subscriptions for keeping up on conversations. The thing that I like best about this setup? I did it all myself, using free and open source tools and services, and I taught myself how to do this using openly available resources online. Ah FOSS, you got it right.