One final point that's worth discussing in this chapter is the matter of WordPress avatars. Although WordPress provides a number of possibilities in this area, the most popular one revolves around an external service, Globally Recognized Avatar (Gravatar). Gravatar started as a tool meant to provide people with the capability of using the same profile picture (avatar) across the entire web.

What this means in plain English is that whenever you sign up for a web service, and if the service is Gravatar-compatible, so to speak, then it will fetch your profile picture from Gravatar automatically, instead of forcing you to upload it manually from your computer. Apart from the profile picture, Gravatar also gives you a personal online profile that anyone can see whenever they click on your (Gravatar) profile picture or something called Hovercard. Now, what does...