January 15, 2009 by Vincent
Twittar: Use Twitter Avatar in WordPress Comments
If you are using Gravatar to avatar-ize your WordPress blog’s comment section, you might want to consider using Twittar. Twittar is a WordPress plugin that pulls avatar off from a commenter’s Twitter account by matching the email address.
But this doesn’t mean that you would have to give up using Gravatar. If a commenter does not have a Twitter account, his Gravatar will be loaded instead, provided he has one. Otherwise, a default avatar (of your choice) will be displayed.
I would rather have Gravatar to be the first choice though. If the user has no Gravatar, then only go for Twitter. Reason is one would expect their Gravatar to be used on blogs, but not their Twitter’s avatar. They might have a more personal avatar on Twitter, and different image for Gravatar that’s more to blog branding.
The implementation of Twittar is more customizable than Gravatar (via the built in feature) in general, with the possibility to specify a CSS class. Meaning you can style it all you want to make it good looking.
For now SheepTech would stick with Gravatar, for I prefer not to have Gravatar to be in the second place to make way for Twitter avatar.
Michael Martin - January 20, 2009 @ 4:32 am
I’m quite tempted to try the plugin out. I love Twitter, so I’m all for it just because of that, but what you said makes sense, people do expect Gravatars in blog comments. They might be a little surprised to find their Twitter avatar there (Though for most people, I’d expect the two to be the same?)
Vincent - January 20, 2009 @ 9:59 pm
I’d be using it too if it works the other way, Gravatar first then Twitter. But until this option is available, I’ll pass.
It depends, some people use their life photo for Twitter, and their blog logo as their Gravatar.