Express your mood with Gravatar + Gmail

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!!