Anyone know what a wavatar is?

[ryanhellyer]

No, the title of this topic does not contain a spelling error (that I know of).


Well all know what an avatar is, it's one of those funny little photos which sits beside our posts in forums.

And some of you may even know what a gravatar is, they're the funny little photos which sit beside our names on some blogs. Gravatar means "Globally Recognised Avatar". The image is obtained via your email address, so when you leave a blog comment, the email address is used by the blog to obtain your 'gravatar' from gravatar.com. This means you don't need to upload a new avatar to every blog you leave a comment on as this would become irritating very quickly - forums are fine, you just add one during the registration process, but blogs which you may only leave one or two comments on are not worth the hassle, hence gravatars are so popular.



But ... do any of you know what the heck a WAVATAR is? Well, I'll tell you ...

Wavatar stands for "Whatever Avatar", they're a replacement for when there's no gravatar associated with an email address. For example, go look at a post on Matt Mullenwegs blog. If you scroll through the comments, you will see that some of the blog comments have regular gravatars, but some are weird geometric shapes. Each shape is identical and is unique to that poster. What happens, is that the email address is sent to gravatar.com and when no corresponding avatar is found (because the user hasn't registered with gravatar.com), it generates a new shape based on that email address. If that address is used on another blog, exactly the same image is generated.

These wavatars are not unique to blogs though (neither are gravatars), I'm using them on a new forum which I'm working on at the moment (very much a work in progress) ... WordPress Dropdown Menu plugin ... the wavatars on my forum are not boring geometric images, but are in fact little monsters. Same concept, different type of image. Each monster is unique to each user and if another site used the same "monster technique", the same monster would be displayed.

If you want to use these on your own site, there is some useful information available on the gravatar blog.