WordPress: Install Jetpack and Enable Hovercards
First things first… do you have an account on Gravatar.com? Go set one up now and enable your public profile. Add your social networks, a description, and a few pictures. Why?
Gravatar’s are universally used to display a photo of you where ever you register or leave a comment and your email address. Don’t worry – they don’t steal or display your email address, they create a hash key… and that hash key is the file name for your photo. It’s a nice secure system. Gravatars have been around quite some time – but now you can set up a full social profile on Gravatar.com. And, since enabling Gravatar public profiles, the sharp folks at Automattic (makers of WordPress) have been busy.
You may have noticed in your WordPress administrative panel that you can now enable Jetpack in WordPress. It’s a series of great add-ons for WordPress that are optimized for high usage and hosted in the cloud. One such feature is the Hovercard. If a site enables Hovercards (you actually don’t even have to be a WordPress site), you can mouseover any gravatar and it will display your profile. It winds up working fantastic with our theme:
Hovercards have been around since last October, but are really becoming popular now that Jetpack is taking hold. Just mouseover an image, and you’ll automatically get the profile of that user! Sweet! If you don’t have a WordPress site, you can still use Gravatars (simple PHP function) and Hovercards (jQuery plus a Hovercard script).