gravatar

If so, the Gravatar is shown along with the comment.

For some time the Gravatar service remained unmaintained.

The maker became busy with working on a new version of the service, as Gravatar's popularity grew and more bandwidth was required.

Preston-Werner is also the creator of the avatar service Gravatar.

"Gravatar Premium" was also launched, which allows unlimited e-mail addresses and Gravatars per account.

Webmasters can also configure their system to automatically display an Identicon when a user has no registered Gravatar.

Gravatar and also support XPM.

On Gravatar, users can register an account based on their email address, and upload an avatar to be associated with the account.

Gravatar support is provided natively in WordPress as of v2.5 and in web based project management application Redmine beginning with version 0.8.

In 2004, Preston-Werner founded Gravatar, a service for providing globally unique avatars that follow users from site to site.

In October, Mullenweg acquired the Gravatar service and was rumored to have turned down a US$200 million offer to buy his company Automattic.

Gravatars are loaded from the Gravatar web-server using a URL containing an MD5 hash of the associated email address.

Matt Mullenweg announced on The Big Web Show on 2 December 2010 that Gravatar was serving approximately 20 billion images per day.

Each Gravatar is rated with an MPAA-style age recommendation, which allows webmasters to control the content of the Gravatars displayed on their website.

Editor's note: Matt Mullenweg is the co-founder of the WordPress blogging software and founder of Automattic, a company than runs WordPress.com and Gravatar.

However, this method has been shown to be vulnerable to dictionary attacks (in one real-life example over 10% of the email addresses of a set of forum users could be determined from the Gravatar URLs combined with the forum user names) and rainbow table approaches.

Gravatar plugins are available for popular blogging software; when the user posts a comment on such a blog that requires an email address, the blogging software checks whether that email address has an associated avatar at Gravatar.

After dropping out of college and working at CNET Networks from 2004 to 2005, Mullenweg quit that job and founded Automattic, the business behind WordPress.com (which provides free WordPress blogs and other services), Akismet, Gravatar, VaultPress, IntenseDebate, Polldaddy, and more.