I recently added two features to the blog that I have somewhat mixed feelings about but I figured that I should at least give them a chance before I naysay them or take them down.
First up, I added Gravatar functionality to the blog’s comment section. What is a Gravatar you ask? It’s a Globally Recognized Avatar. Basically it’s a little picture or graphic like what you’d find on a forum that’s used to identify your posts and comments. All the Globally Recognized part means is that the image is linked to an email address of your choosing so any site that you go to that uses Gravatars will post associate an avatar with your email.
I personally like this idea and it’s native to 90% of the themes on WordPress (not surprising as the WordPress guys bought Gravatar recently) but it didn’t seem to be that way with the particular theme that I’m using so I got off my lazy arse and went ahead and played around and activated it (I’m still trying to clean up/tweak the sidebar widget to fix the number of list stars that appear in the background). Now all I have to do is manage to convince people to actually use Gravatars. So go sign up already. It’s free and there’s no spam involved. There, wasn’t that convincing? Yeah, I didn’t think so.
The other feature that I added was Twitter, which is the add on that I’m unsure about. I just don’t know if I need it. For the most part though, I’m just trying to actually figure out what the point of the whole thing is and why everyone is making such a damn fuss over the idea. I mean, I get the general gist of it: you can use it to keep your readers “up to date” about your current whereabouts and such in “realtime”. It’s a perfect example of the whole interactive Web 2.0 ideal that everyone spouts off on in the media these days and from that theoretical standpoint I like it. From a practical standpoint however, I feel that I just don’t lead an interesting enough life to warrant 24/7 interaction.
Maybe I’m wrong though and there’s a dedicated cult of nubile young women out there stalking and tracking my every move (wouldn’t that be nice). Who knows. I guess I’ll leave it up for the moment and see how useful useless it turns to really be. If the nubile nymph cult comes calling, you lot will probably be the last to know. 😀
Yeah, I looked into Twitter a few months ago, said, “Wow, that’s moronic,” and moved on.
Maybe I’ll get me a Gravatar though.
I’m easily amused I guess. While I agree it’s rather pointless for most people, I can see the use for it if you happen to do a lot of Mobile blogging or are very interactive with your site.
Once I get my phone turned back on I’ll probably integrate it and see if it becomes any more useful for me. Until then, it’s really just like the status updates on Facebook. Amusing and pointless… but then one could say the same for this whole website.