In what may well be the beginning of the inevitable downward spiral into creeping featurism upon this blog, I’ve installed Gravatar support into the comments. For those as yet unaware of gravatars, and I admit to some ignorance myself as to whether it is a Proper Title which should be capitalized or merely a common noun undeserving of such, they are, according to the site, globally recognized avatars which presumably can be viewed on any blog which supports them.

I have to confess to some bias in this matter: I started out blogging, in the Public Diary kind of way rather than any actual intention of providing useful information to the masses, on Livejournal, and the second best thing about Livejournal in my rather subjective opinion is the availability of user avatars, which I have grown used to in a manner which is completely removed from any actual tangible benefit of the feature. Commenters transform from arbitrary names in my mind to equally arbitrary and yet reassuring images, tiny rectangles of indistinct colours and shapes recognizable at a glance.

The downsides of this arrangement are immediately apparent, of course: first on my mind is site load, which I have no way of checking in a systematic manner, and even if I did get some hard numbers out of it, playing MMORPGs has proven to me that numbers are insigificant compared to the User Experience of “it just feels weird somehow…” I am not expecting major issues to erupt due to gravatars, but I will probably be watching comments about it very closely, and I might pull the plug on gravatars if it comes to that.

And of course, to get a gravatar, one has to sign up for it. The inertia of apathy is difficult to overcome, and I’ve had several opportunities pass me by because I am just tired of having to register for yet another site or service of limited scope and use. Nobody is, by any stretch of the imagination, obliged to get a gravatar; this is mostly for those who have already obtained one prior. I signed up for one only very recently, mainly because It Seemed Like A Good Idea At The Time.

For now, the actual gravatar support has been implemented somewhat haphazardly, due to a severe lack of any sort of design sense on my part. I’ve provided a very standard default avatar for the gravatar-less, all while taking no responsibility for any headaches incurred from unravelling 436 petabytes of the non-reversed SOS Brigade logo squeezed into an 80×80 square.