You might have noticed that the site now includes little pictures in the comments sections. WordPress 2.5+ now supports Gravatar (globally recognized avatar) by default, which basically allows users to associate a profile picture with their email address and have it automatically loaded onto certain websites (mainly self-hosted WordPress and WordPress.com blogs, as of now). It’s free of charge, so you could go on and get your own Gravatar now if you often leave comments on such sites.

Typically, non-Gravatar users (i.e. almost everybody) would get ugly default icons though, but more recently other options have been added that allows an image to be auto-generated based off the commentor’s email address. I was initially going with the default MonsterID option, but later realised that there’s actually an updated set of ‘artistic’ MonsterIDs available via a plugin.


Default vs Artistic MonsterID

It meant a little more work, but somehow I’m really charmed by these little randomly-generated critters, so I’ve installed the plugin and all commentors now get a cool picture, regardless of whether you have a Gravatar or not (you might have to refresh your browser cache to see the changes).

So, go on, generate your MonsterID today by leaving a comment – you know you want to!