WordPress.org, along with WordPress.com, supports the Gravatar service. Gravatar is yet another central service that complements WordPress.
In case you aren't familiar with the concept on which this service is based, you need to start by getting familiar with avatars. An avatar is a digital artifact, such as a small picture, that represents you in cyberspace. Gravatar takes this concept one step further by allowing you to associate an avatar with an e-mail address-thereby creating a gravatar. Whenever you comment from that e-mail address on a WordPress Blog that supports gravatars, your little icon shows up
I'm willing to wager that gravatars are among those things that inspire strong feelings, both for and against. Some people think that gravatars liven up a drab WordPress Blog and let people express their individuality; others think gravatars are a silly waste of time. WordPress can accommodate either viewpoint. You can enable or disable gravatars with one click. If you don't want them on your WordPress Blog, select Don't Show Avatar.
I know what you're thinking: "Mike, you have a great avatar!" Thanks- you're too kind. But what about folks who don't have avatars of their own? You can set a default avatar that WordPress will display for anyone who doesn't have a personal avatar.
Static images Nothing at all Avatars that WordPress generates randomly, based on the user's e-mail address: Identicon, Wavatar, or MonsterID.
Think back to when you installed WordPress. Do you recall that the installer asked you whether you wanted your WordPress Blog to be listed with search engines, especially Google? If you ever change your mind about that choice, you can easily toggle the Blog Visibility setting.
The Internet is built on the concept of linking. You link to my WordPress Blog, I link to yours, and everyone's happy. The unspoken agreement in linking is that the link location won't change. Each of your individual blog posts has a URL associated with it; this URL is called a hyperlink. This hyperlink is meant to be permanent so that people can always find your blog post, no matter when they visit that link.
By default, a WordPress Blog's URL structure looks like this:
http://www.wordpressforall.com/?p=11
The first part is the WordPress Blog's URL. After the slash (/) is ?p=, which is how PHP handles URL variables. The number is the POST ID variable of the blog post in question. Databases such as MySQL database can easily remember things based on variables like POST ID, but we humans are made of different stuff. People aren't the only things that are at a disadvantage with the default WordPress URL structure: The URLs aren't very friendly to search engines. The more descriptive your hyperlinks are, the better a search engine can index them, resulting in more people being able to find your WordPress Blog. hyperlinks are important, which is why WordPress devotes a whole part of settings to them. Before I get into the various kinds of hyperlinks you can set up for your WordPress Blog, however, I need to discuss how they work on a technical level.
WordPress supports various types of hyperlinks by using the mod_rewrite module for Apache-a piece of software known as a Web server. Your Web host most likely is using Apache because the software is both very popular and free. Functionality can be added to Apache via modules, one of which is mod_rewrite, which enables Apache to rewrite URLs on the fl y. This module is important for purposes of this discussion because no matter which hyperlink structure you choose, WordPress uses the URL with the POST ID in it to find your blog post. The mod_rewrite module knows how to map one URL that is easy to remember to another URL based on rules. The mod_rewrite rules can become complicated quickly, but WordPress takes care of writing the rules for you, so don't worry about them. Check your Web host's documentation, however, to make sure that its servers support mod_rewrite.
When you've made sure that mod_rewrite is available to you, go ahead and pick your hyperlink structure. WordPress has five options for hyperlinks.
The default structure isn't very friendly.
This option creates a hyperlink based on a combination of the date of the blog post and the blog post title.
This option drops the day from the URL for a shorter hyperlink.
The Numeric option is even shorter. This hyperlink structure brings back your old friend POST ID but presents it in a way that is a little less cryptic than ?p=11.
Whenever you select one of the first four hyperlink structures, the Custom Structure text box is populated automatically. When you select Day and Name, for example, this appears in the text box:
/%year%/%monthnum%/%day%/%postname%/
All hyperlink structures are built from these hyperlink tags. You can build your very own custom hyperlink structure by mixing and matching tags.
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