This post has nothing to do with housing. It’s a total departure from my usual posts.
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
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To Edzee, Tyrone (Millionaire Acts) and James of PinoyMoneyTalk, congratulations to the three of you for being finalists in this year’s Philippine Blog Awards.
Whoever among you wins, you’re all winners in my list. Wag na sanang lumabas ng PMT ang winner.
May the best blogger win.
Good Luck to all of you.
You rule!!!
Gravatars are one of the ways to brand yourself as the blogger. Favicons are the equivalent in terms of blogs.
Hello, Ed
I will look into all your suggestions soon. I’m just doing a lot of site tweaking.
You look good in your gravatar, bro.
Thanks a lot for dropping by.
Hi Jun,
I am also using a gravatar since I started blogging which was not too long ago. I hope it will appear here.
If you want some more come-ons for good commenters, you may want to add “Subscribe To Comments”, “CommentLuv” and “Comment Policy for WordPress”. You can how they look on the comment box of my blogs.
Below is a sample of a spam comment by Sunil. I approved it temporarily just to show how one looks like.
I can’t guarantee the safety of your PC if you click on his link.
This person is real and he has a website. If he’s the one who actually read my post, not his robot or web crawler, and wanted to comment, he could have easily “typed” the URL of his website on the field provided in the reply form.
Bots may be good at crawling the internet, but like any creepy crawlers, they don’t have hands that can type.
Thanks for informing me about this. Before coming to this site i had no knowledge of this thing. But now your site give me a great information.
SUNIL
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Wow! Jay Castillo, my idol visiting my site? To be honest with you, it’s your site that inspired me to use the Flexibility theme; I’m serious. I’ll take you up on your offer to help me with my site; it’s still in disarray.
About the Gravatar, I hope all those who have commented or will comment will grab their own; I can’t use my picture for my Gravatar. Otherwise those without one will have my picture beside their names.
How did you put the smiley in your comment, by the way? I like it.
Thanks a lot for dropping by.
Hi Jun, I have also been using a gravatar since I started blogging.
Nice site! I see you also used the flexibility theme. If you need any help with it, just let me know. Been using it for quite sometime now with my own site.
Thanks for the heads up, Celine. I’ve already edited my post based on your comment.
It’s comment like this that I really, really welcome.
Again, thanks a lot, for the correction and for dropping by.
Correction lang, Jun: Tom Werner of Gravatar is different from the Tom Werner who is a television producer. The Gravatar guy is really young.