my thoughts, musings, rants and discoveries . . .

So, as I’ve been going down the path of migrating all of my domains from Hurricane Electric to Go Daddy, I’ve encountered a few problems with getting the old Favatars to work properly. The issue, and I’m not sure if it’s the hosting or if it’s the migration to a newer version of the Favatar plugin, but something just doesn’t work right. When I go to create my database of associated favatars, the result is that no favicon is found. Hmm… they used to be there.

Anyway, if you recall when I went down that path, it was to find a way to get the equivalent of an avatar next to the commenters’ names. And Gravatar was going through some major difficulties as their hosting provider didn’t apparently like the demand they were under. So I went with Favatar support.

My choice of using Favatars seemed to be a good one at the time, but it looks like the project is pretty much abandoned. I’ve not seen any changes to the plug-in code and it’s getting to be a pain for me to maintain. As a result, I’ve decided to make the switch to Gravatars.

Please help me out and register your Gravatar so that my site can look right again . With that said, here’s what you can do:

1. Go to the Gravatar.com home page
2. Click on Sign up now
3. Enter your email address, you’ll get a confirmation email with a link to activate your new account
4. Click on the link emailed to you and enter in your password to your Gravatar account
5. You’ll be redirected to a registration page where you can subscribe to their newsletter or skip it (either is fine for this purpose)
6. Moving on will take you to a page to add a Gravatar to your account and to link it to your email address
7. Click “add a new one“
8. Here’s where you can make things interesting by either choosing an image from your own computer or you can select your existing favicon as a gravatar. If you’d like to use your existing one, you can simply use a link to your url/favicon.ico (e.g. http://wildernessvoice.com/favicon.ico). You can cut and paste or just type the address into the URL box then click next.
9. The only caveat about using an existing favicon is that typical favicons are 16×16 pixels in size. So they can be quite small. My favatar fix from before allowed for images up to 32×32 pixels. And Gravatar allows for even bigger ones. I still prefer the 32×32 size as any thing larger can be quite overwhelming.
10. Click the link “Back to My Gravatars“
11. You’ll see your email address along with the gravatar you’ve just uploaded. However, you need to link the two together. You do this by simply clicking on the gravatar and then confirming the selection.

That’s pretty much it. For those on WordPress who would like help adding the support to your site, just let me know and I can either walk you through it or make the changes for you.

Technorati Tags: WordPress, Gravatars, Avatars, Favatars