gavatars

I’m not Doug, but would you humor me: what are you talking about?

lol

-Ginger

hey Misty, i’m typing with my little one is nursing..glad to hear i’m not the only one that types with one hand.

I know that I had to clear out my old gavatar or something in my account..if you go back to the website and press the help button it will tell you what to do to have you new pic come up immediately.

Shelly

I tho’t those were avatars. What’s the diff?

Not being sarcastic fyi. 🙂

Okay, I have answers, but put on your boots ’cause it might get a little geeky in here… 🙂

The little pictures representing who you are online are often called an “avatar”. Many online services let you upload an avatar and they will show that next to your posts and such.

Then we have “gravatar”, which stands for “globally recognized avatar”. Global meaning you don’t have to upload one for each service. You set up your avatar one time with http://gravatar.com and it is used by all sorts of different sites that tie into the service. So not only will we see your smiling face here, but it will show on other forums and blog comments, etc.

When you update your gravatar picture it updates everywhere. Making a new post doesn’t actually do anything to test a new picture or make it load. Your current gravatar image will eventually show for new and old posts.

It really only takes a few minutes for everything to get updated. But your browser software stores copies of things so it doesn’t have to transfer them over the Internet each time you look at the same page. That is known as your browser’s “cache” and it’s done to make pages load faster.

After a certain amount of time, your browser throws away what’s in the cache and loads a fresh copy. That’s when you will see your avatar update. Because of this, one person may see an updated image before another even though they are viewing the same page.

It is possible to force your browser to reload a page from scratch and see the changes sooner. How you do that depends on your browser software. It usually involves holding down a special key (shift, option, alt, ctrl, etc.) while you click the reload button. I think you can also force it with ctrl-F5 in Windows and Command-R on a Mac.

There you have it. I hope that wasn’t too bad.

Ok I don’t see the new little one yet. I can’t wait!! I guess Faith is the blessed one to see the avatar change first.

Shelly