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  • New Gravatar Hovercards: Faster, Open-Source, and Everywhere

    Hovercards offer a sleek, interactive way to showcase user profiles. With just a hover over the Gravatar image, a card displays essential information about the user. This eliminates the need to navigate away from the current page and encourages engagement.

    A new open-sourced Gravatar Hovercards library is live for users of WordPress.com and Jetpack, and is available to be implemented by anyone around the web. Here’s what’s new:

    • Leaner and faster: By pruning redundant code and harnessing modern web APIs, we’ve achieved greater efficiency and reduced file sizes by more than 200%.
    • Improved UX: The hovercard design is more refined and will work better across sites with different styles and branding. The library now supports different placements to cater to a variety of needs.
    • Universal hovercards: The new library introduces the ability to attach hovercards to any element, not just the avatar image. For example, a site can @someone and show the hovercard on hover.
    • Open to the world: Developers can integrate it into their sites via the NPM package.

    If you aren’t seeing hovercards on your WordPress site, go to Settings -> Discussion and look for the setting to enable pop-up business cards. You will need to be hosted on WordPress.com or have the free Jetpack plugin installed.

    We encourage you to explore Gravatar hovercards, and welcome your ideas and contributions via our GitHub repo.

  • New on Gravatar: Collect Payments on the Go!

    Have you updated your free Gravatar profile page recently?

    We are excited to announce the launch of new payment features on Gravatar profiles! 

    Now, you can add verified payment links for PayPal, Venmo, and Patreon and share your cryptocurrency wallet addresses (Bitcoin, Dogecoin, Ethereum, and more). When someone looks at your profile on their phone, they’ll see a new button at the top to Send Money. 

    A screenshot of the Gravatar profile in mobile view, showing a Send Money button and a Share Profile button.

    A new Share Profile button also displays your unique QR code and a simple way to copy your link, allowing you to share your profile with others quickly.

    Millions of people view Gravatar profiles every month. Keep your profile up-to-date and manage your online identity by adding verified links to the services you use, such as Instagram, Tumblr, GitHub, Mastodon, and more. Adding multiple payment options to your profile builds trust that those paying you know they have the correct account.

    Gravatar is your personal digital business card. And now a one-stop place for those that need to send you payments.

    Edit Your Profile
    Claim Your New Gravatar

  • Something funny happened

    On the way to building a Gravatar app, we noticed that taking pictures of ourselves to update our Gravatars was something we only wanted to do every month or so, but then we started taking selfies and sharing them with each other and that became a daily and very fun habit. So our Gravatar app morphed into a Selfies app, and it’s now ready for the world to play with! You can read more about the app here. We hope you become one of the first brave souls to try it out, and let us know what you think.

  • Mobile Friendly

    We just made the Gravatar.com website, blog, and all profile pages friendlier towards mobile devices. Additionally, you can now edit your profile on the go.

    Enjoy!

  • A question for Gravatar users

    We are working on a Gravatar mobile app and would like to ask our users:

  • Manage Multiple Identities with One Gravatar Account

    Did you know that you can have multiple email addresses associated with your Gravatar account? And that each email address can use a different image? Managing multiple email addresses with Gravatar is a snap.

    Many of us have multiple email accounts — for work, school, our personal lives, our blogs, online groups we belong to, and more. Many of us also use different images of ourselves on different websites. You might not want your professional image to be the same as what you’d use on Twitter or Facebook.

    Gravatar can help you manage these identities by allowing you to use associate a different image with each email address you’ve connected to Gravatar. To get started, sign in to Gravatar. You’ll see all the email addresses associated with your account, and all the images you’ve uploaded:

    gravatar

    Pick the email address you’d like to edit, and select an image (or add a new one using the blue link at the top). We’ll double-check with you to make sure you want to make this change:

    gravatar confirm copy

    And there you go!

    gravatar climax

    Make sure you use this email address when participating online, and the appropriate Gravatar will appear alongside. Now, your online identities are neatly separated, and you’re presenting yourself exactly as you prefer.

  • Add your WordPress sites to your Gravatar Profile

    Now we’ve made it easy for you to promote your WordPress sites on your Gravatar Profile.

    You’ve always been able to add your WordPress sites manually, just as you can with any other existing web page. In addition, now we also also display a handy list of your WordPress.com and Jetpack-connected sites from which you can select. Simply log into your Gravatar account and follow the instructions on the “How to Add websites to Your Gravatar Profile” support page. Once you’ve done so, you will see thumbnails of your chosen WordPress.com sites on your Gravatar profile.

    grav-sites-full

  • Have a self-hosted WordPress site? Supercharge your Gravatars with Jetpack

    We’ve written about Gravatar Hovercards before — the nifty pop-up that adds a name, bio, and link to more info when you hover over a Gravatar on WordPress.com. Hovercards are a great way to learn more about the people commenting on your site, and to share your own contact info.

    But what about all the self-hosted WordPress sites? Are you stuck with simplified Gravatars if you’re not using WordPress.com?

    Not if you have Jetpack installed!

    Jetpack is a powerful, multipurpose plugin brought to you by Automattic, the same great folks behind WordPress.com and Gravatar. It’s a single plugin that hooks into the power of the WordPress.com cloud to bring you dozens of features for which you’d normally need dozens of individual plugins: social sharing, robust stats, proofreading tools, extra sidebar widgets, photo galleries and carousels, contact forms, image optimization, and more — like Gravatar Hovercards.

    Now, when you hover over a commenter’s Gravatar, you’ll learn more about them and how to find them in other online spaces:

    Hovercard

    Just install Jetpack and make sure the Gravatar Hovercards module is enabled to give your site visitors the tools to create deeper connections.

    (If you’d like to do even more with Gravatars, the WordPress Plugin Directory has several other well-rated plugins to enhance Gravatars — we like HiDPI Gravatar, which uses Javascript to replace standard Gravatar images with retina-ready images.)

  • Gravatar and WordPress.com, Together Forever

    Did you know that your Gravatar.com account has always been a WordPress.com account? It’s true.

    Back in 2007 we (Automattic) acquired Gravatar. Heading into 2008 we rewrote it in PHP, and ever since then, it’s been using the same integrated user system as WordPress.com for accounts. Previously we handled that “behind the scenes,” but we found that it made things pretty confusing for everyone. We’ve now switched over to using WordPress.com Connect exclusively, which allows you to explicitly connect Gravatar and WordPress.com, and to use your WordPress.com credentials to log into Gravatar. That’s one less set of login credentials to worry about!

    wpcc-button
    This is not a real button 🙂

    1. If you had a Gravatar account before, it’s actually always been a WordPress.com account!
    2. When you try to log in at Gravatar.com now, you will be asked to do so using WordPress.com Connect.
    3. Once you’re logged into WordPress.com, you then grant Gravatar access to use your WordPress.com account.
    4. After that, you’ll use your WordPress.com username and password to log in to Gravatar, for evermore.

    You might be wondering about existing accounts and creating new accounts, and what your options are:

    • If you have a Gravatar account, it’s actually also a WordPress.com account. You can use those details to log into WordPress.com, then grant access to Gravatar.
    • If you already have a WordPress.com account, then you can use that to log into Gravatar.com now.
    • If you don’t have a WordPress.com (or Gravatar) account, you can create one for free (no need for a blog, although you can do that also if you like!) and then you can grant access to Gravatar to get started.

    The beauty of switching to WordPress.com Connect is that it means your account information is all managed in one, super-secure place (WordPress.com), and it avoids all sorts of complexity and potential for problems with password resets, account activations, and more. We’re in the process of switching all of our services to using WordPress.com Connect, so you can use the same account to log into our other nifty products, including VaultPress, Akismet and Polldaddy.

    There’s a bunch more info on the WordPress.com Connect FAQ, which will hopefully help clear up any other questions you have.

  • Gravatar: Creating a Truly Global System

    We can’t really call Gravatars “globally recognized avatars” unless they’re realistically available to people the world over, and that means making sure everyone who wants to use one has language access. That’s why Gravatar, like every Automattic joint, relies on a fantastic group of international volunteers to translate almost everything we create, ensuring that what we do is globally accessible.

    In the past few weeks, we’ve completed the French and Korean translations of en.gravatar.com, bringing the total number of available languages to 43, from Georgian to Norwegian to Bengali.

    (If you’ve never heard of Georgian, take a minute to click over — it’s a beautiful script!)

    If you visit any of the non-English Gravatar pages, you might still see some content in English — that’s because almost all these pages are works-in-progress. If you’d like to contribute to one of them, or start a translation for a language that’s not currently on the list, we’d love to have you! Just click on “help translate” next to any of the currently available languages, or visit the Gravatar GlotPress page to see exactly what still needs to be done, learn how to become a translator, and add your language to the list.