Andy Gambles

I have been asked this question a few times both in person and on a few forums. Many blogs now have an avatar (wikipedia explanation) displayed next to the comment made by a particular person. This avatar is usually a picture of the actual person making the comment.

This is also being used by many forums and social networking websites. But how does your image get onto that website?

This is done by a website called Gravatar. This stands for Globally recognized avatar. You can sign up and upload your gravatar. It is then linked to your email address. Whenever you make a blog comment or forum post using your email address then your gravatar will be loaded by the blog/forum automatically.