If you don’t know what Identicons are, then you probably haven’t been on WordPress.com lately. I had been seeing them around hosted sites for a while now, but I was happy to see that WP had worked it and other avatars besides the Mystery Man, , and default Gravatar icon, , into WordPress.com. Unfortunately, I was hoping for too much in thinking that the 2.5.1 upgrade would have this as well. But, alas, it does not.

Here’s the post: Default Avatar Options - Identicons.

So, now commenters that do not have gravatars (& if you don’t, you should!) will have the same pattern off to the side, dependent upon their email address. Isn’t that cool? Personally, I think that they look like little quilt patterns!

So, anyone with a WordPress.com blog doesn’t have to worry about downloading this plugin or anything. I do hope that in a future update they will be adding it to hosted WordPress blogs too.

For anyone commenting here, your avatar will remain the same as long as you continue to use the same email address. If you want to be difficult or test it out, you can always use a different (but valid) email address to switch your avatar to something different. Each email address will continue to have the same avatar until I reset it or it implodes, which ever comes first.