Want Avatars In Your Comments? 5 Wordpress Plugins You NEED To Look At!

Blogging has become an important and large part of social networking on the whole. One thing most people that frequent blogs want is to stick out, personal branding in one of it’s base forms. So if you run a blog you need to ask yourself how not only you can stand out but- How can you encourage your readers to stand out?

Well to start with one of the easiest ways is to allow for those who respond to your posts to show off who they are by using an avatar of themselves. In terms of blogging and social networking an avatar is a digital representation of yourself online. It can be a picture of yourself or an image that you associate with. Let’s not beat around the bush. Here are 5 wordpress plugins that I suggest if you plan on adding pictures/avatars to your user’s comments:

MyAvatars
MyAvatars is a plugin designed for users of MyBlogLog.com and is able to pull a user’s avatar directly from their user pic on this popular blogger networking service. The added bonus of this plugin is that not only will they have their name link to the website that they will in but they get an added link to their MyBlogLog profile from their avatar.

You can download the MyAvatars Plugin from here!

Twittar
While the newest of the five Avatar plugins that I have listed here this one should grow the quickest. With Twitter becoming so integrated in the blogging lifestyle it was only a matter of time before someone was able to find a way to code a program that would incorporate Twitter avatars into your comments. Smashing Magazine was the first to come up with a way to do so and so was born the Twittar plugin!

You can download the Twittar Plugin from here!

DISQUS Comment System
DISQUS is not just a plugin for comments but an entire commenting system. It hosts it’s own avatars for anyone who uses this commenting system on their site and makes a few changes you don’t see from the other plugins I have listed here. It allows for comments to be indexed be search engines, provides a built in threaded commenting system, it’s own spam filtering, comment widgets, and quite a few other features that I don’t need to go into while we are focusing on avatars. To get the most bank for your buck FEATURE wise this is the best of these 5 plugins.

You can download the Disques Pluguin from here!

AVrAmTAR
AVrAmTAR.com is a basic avatar service but has something neat which some people may enjoy. It allows you to have multiple avatars connected with your account. This is a service more for people who do not wish to have just one avatar associated with them and would prefer a random avatar from the collection of pictures that they have uploaded to their account. It’s a plugin that I’ve seen used in various art community blogs though not too much past there.

You can download the AVrAmTAR Plugin from here!

WP-Gravatars
Everyone has their Avatar plugin of choice and for years this is the one that I personally have enjoyed using. “This plugin lets you use Gravatar, MyBlogLog, OpenAvatar, Wavatar, Identicon, monsterID or Favico.ico files with your comments.“Gravatars, or globally recognized avatars, is one of the first avatar services that I stumbled upon for including avatars within blogs. While all of the plugins on this list have their uses and own strengths this one has the highest level of avatars it can import from and is what I suggest to use. If you are going by just the ability to allow customization of where your users can have their avatar and the most flexibility- the other plugins just can’t compete with the range of services to pull avatars from.

You can download the WP_Gravatars Plugin from here!

There are many other avatar plugins available as well. While some of them also use other services, the majority of the others I have seen out there import avatars from the services listed above. This is a feature that is easy to include in your wordpress blog that helps your readers stand out while commenting by adding a bit of their own branding to each comment.

Tagged as: Avatars, Commenting, Wordpress Plugins