I had a quick think and remembered Edward extoling the virtues of PHPFog.

“It’s like Heroku for PHP!”

WordPress is written in PHP, and PHPFog (like Heroku) has a free plan with just enough resources to get a site off the ground.

“Perfect!” I thought. “There must be a way to get WordPress on there!”

Easy Peasy

Turns out there is, and it’s really easy. As soon as you create an account with PHPFog, you’re taken to a page with a big list of commonly installed apps that you can drop onto your (shared) app server and WordPress is right at the top.

From there it was a breeze: We filled in the login info we wanted and the PHPFog back end did the rest. It took a few minutes for everything to spool up, but once it did we had our very own Wordress installation to play with and tweak to our hearts content.

Scaling Up

Naturally the resources available on the free plan wouldn’t stand up to a huge amount of traffic, but at that point one could easily upgrade or export one’s content to be relocated elsewhere.

So, if you find yourself in need of a pop-up wordpress instance on the cheap, have a gander at PHPFog!

Step 1: Find a picture of yourself.

Obviously, we’re going to need a picture to work with. The important part here is that it has to be of you. Twitter recommends this, and I understand why. An avatar should be unique, so that people can instantly recognize it and not confuse it with others. The most reliable way to do this is to use a picture of yourself. Using a picture of your favourite celebrity, comic-book character or pet might represent your interests, but you’re not the only person to have a crush on Nathan Fillion (That’s an entirely hypothetical example, btw)*. What’s more, if you change your avatar at a later date, as long as you use another picture of yourself people will still recognize who is posting. Human beings are very good at recognizing faces.

* I bet there are several thousand people running round the internet wearing Nathan Fillion’s face, but there should only be one person wearing yours. Unless you happen to be Nathan Fillion.

Step 2: Crop the image as close to your face as possible.

The thing to remember about an avatar is that it’s usually very small. In order to make sure you are as recognizable as possible, you should make your face fill as much of the avatar as possible. Note that your face is not the same as your head. Here’s an example featuring yours truely:

Look at all that extra space we got rid of! All the elements of the image that I want to display are still there: The hat, the badge, and my face. All the details are a lot easier to make out in the cropped image as it hasn’t been shrunk as much as the other one to fit in the 100×100 space available.

Step 3: Use the same avatar wherever you go.

This is less of an issue if all your avatars are pictures of you, but it’s still a good idea. Services such as Gravatar make this really easy, because it does all the hard work for you. Basically, using the same avatar (and the same username) everywhere you go on the net allows you to build up a more complete model of your personality across different services. For example, if I use the same avatar on all the different blogs I comment on, then other people who also read those same blogs will (hopefully) notice that I’m the same guy posting on all of them.

Conclusion

Avatars are our visual representatives online. I think that my best (and most honest) representative is me. I am by no means claiming that this is the be-all and end-all of avatar advice, but I do think that it’s a good starting point. If you have other ideas, or points that you think I should add, please comment!

Here’s a nice feature I didn’t know Gravatar had: The url of your avatar image is static. It’s not even a ‘feature’ as such, but what it does mean is that when using websites/forums that don’t support Gravatar you can give them this url and your avatar should update along with the cached version on the Gravatar server. Neat, eh?

To take advantage of this functionality, you need the direct link to your image. When managing your Gravatar account, you’ll see the link to the image in the lower right:

Another little gem: Gravatar converts your image into several different formats for you. The image I uploaded was a png, but the forum I wanted to use it on would only take jpgs. On a hunch I tried just changing the extension on the url. It worked! Gif is also supported like this, and for all I know there may be more. Try it! Just make sure to let me know if you find any more cool stuff there, ok?