One standard feature of this blog and most other blogs is the comment section where readers are encouraged to post comments on each entry. I personally welcome whatever comment my readers may throw at me, whether positive or negative, as long as they’re constructive and honest. I also welcome those from fellow bloggers whose comments create  links to their own websites or blogs; it’s a common practice among bloggers as a way for us to help generate traffic to one another’s sites.

What I don’t welcome are spam comments, which I receive scores of. These comments are created not by people but by what we call robots, spiders or web crawlers. These are programs used by bloggers to propagate their websites across thousands, even hundreds of thousands of websites in the internet with the click of a button.

Did you know that you may comment as many times as you like but none of them may ever appear? It’s because web admins like me have the final say on whether we want to publish your comments or not. We get first dibs on your comments. We may even edit your comments and spin them around if we like (I swear, I’ll never do that).

But let’s get on to the meat of the matter – What is Gravatar?

This image  used to be the default avatar of all commenters, including myself, in this site; it’s called the mystery man avatar and looks like a shooting target, it’s ugly: ( So far, only one visitor who’s a professional blogger himself, has figured out the beauty and importance of having a gravatar.

“Gravatar is short for Globally recognized avatar… or icon, or representation of you and follows you from site to site appearing beside your name when you do things on any blog, web forum or website.”

Created by Tom Werner , a gravatar makes it possible for a person to have one avatar across the entire web,” including Facebook. That’s unless you modify your profile settings in each website, social media network or forum that you have ever been to or will become a member of.

Isn’t that cool?

Warning to forum “tambays” who enjoy trolling or flaming – your identities will be revealed.

I just signed up at Gravatar and uploaded an image (not my picture; if you want to see how ugly I am, check out the bottom part of my About page) to promote the use of Gravatar. So now, all others who commented have the Gravatar logo as their default avatar.

Change it by grabbing your own globally recognized avatar at gravatar.com and establish a personalized online presence in the world wide web and let’s all cease looking like shooting targets in every forum and website that we frequent.

Thanks a lot

References: WordPress.org, Gravatar.com