Express your mood with Gravatar + Gmail

Give more passion to your blog comments and express your true feelings!

Gravatar
Google Mail

Do you love Gravatar? Do you want a little a more control over which image shows up?... Here's a simple trick to allow you to convey your mood when you comment on somone's blog using Gravatar..

Ingredients:

1x Gravatar Account
1x Google Account (optional)
2x Pictures
1x Cup of Coffee

How it works (plus symbols in email addresses):

GMail ( and some other MTAs I think? ) will allow a plus symbol (+) to appear in the left-hand-side of your email address. The plus and everything after it - up to the at symbol (@) - is ignored.

That means that these two email addresses are effectively the same and they will both route to the same inbox:

jimbo.morrison@gmail.com
jimbo.morrison+helloworld@gmail.com

Gravatar, meanwhile, allows you to have lots of email addresses and assign different images to your different email addresses.

So armed with as many email addresses as you like through your one Gmail account, your Gravatar account, your library of self portraits and a cup of coffee we can start to have a bit of fun with this...

Step 1: Google Account

First thing you'll need is a Gmail Account. If you don't want to use gmail don't worry - you don't need to. Google have a very open policy and you're welcome to either forward all your gmail to Hotmail, Yahoo! or anywhere really or you can pick it up from IMAP or POP. You never need visit Google again.

Step 2: Gravatar Account

Next you'll need to get yourself a Gravatar account. This just takes a few minutes too - you can sign up for a Gravatar account here.

Step 3: Upload a few pictures

Now you've a gravatar account you can upload a few photos of yourself in different moods, poses or, in my case - because I'm camera shy - a picture of your dog and the cow you met on holiday!

Step 4: Invent some mood-accounts

You'll now be able to add ( and verify ) a few mood accounts in Gravatar. In this example we've gone for jimbo.morrison+megan@gmail.com ( Meg is the dog ) and jimbo.morrison+highland@gmail.com ( and it's a highland cow )...

Step 6: Assign the pics to the mood-accounts

Now you can select each of you your 'mood accounts' in Gravatar and select the picture you want to associate with each.

Step 7: Show us what you've got!

Last but by no means least - test your new mood-gravatars out and show us what you've created by commenting below!!

Posted last year by Jim Morrison

Tagged as: Gravatar, Company News

Jim is a director of Deep Blue Sky Digital, a web development and design studio in the city of Bath in the UK. He loves to get involved in his client's businesses to help push them forward and out onto the web but his real pasion is for code... Perl, PHP, sh, javascript... it doesn't really matter as long as it works! You can follow Jim on twitter @deepbluetweets and @jimbomorrison

3 Comments on this post

Jim said “Possibly the coolest cow...” last year

This is a very friendly Highland Cow we met in Pitlochery... which I've decided to call Norman in honour of the City Slickers calf.
Jim said “Everyone - meed Megan” last year

This is Megan, the office dog, with the smallest stick she could find. Woof!
Debasish said “Never thought of this!” last year

And this is the all-weather-ruff-n-tuff me :D