Thursday, February 6, 2014

Feature of the week: Your Gravatar profile picture on BibSonomy

“Your Gravatar is an image that follows you from site to site […]. Avatars help identify your posts on blogs and web forums, so why not on any site?”
- http://gravatar.com


On BibSonomy, you have the possibility to directly upload a profile image, which was shown in your post discussions and your CV page (see also this post).You might know this behavior from other websites as well. If you wanted to update your avatar picture on each account where you've set it, this might become a tedious task.

With the upcoming release, BibSonomy features Gravatar profile images in addition to directly uploaded pictures. So, you can use your image – once uploaded to http://gravatar.com/ – on a variety of websites, now also including BibSonomy!

Using Gravatar is quite easy. BibSonomy uses your email address to identify you at Gravatar and resolve your profile image from there:

Figure 1: The form in BibSonomy where you put your mail address

If you already possess a Gravatar account, and uploaded an image for the email address associated with this account, you only have to set the picture preferences at your SettingsPage of BibSonomy to use Gravatar instead of a locally uploaded image:

Figure 2: You can easily change the source of your avatar picture on your settings page.

Otherwise, you need to register at http://gravatar.com/ in advance and add an image for the email address you use for BibSonomy:

Figure 3: Associating your BibSonomy mail address with your Gravatar account.

In each case, BibSonomy now will apply your Gravatar image for the CV and everywhere else:

Figure 4: The profile picture, being served by Gravatar.

Have fun with your new image & Happy tagging!
Torbjörn Cunis