The Personal Avatar (aka Pavatar) is a personal picture hosted on your webspace which is then used by websites to display whenever referring to content provided by YOU, the user. An example would be if you made a comment or a site posting where an avatar is required. This way, delivering your Personal Avatar is peripheral and can be (nearly) anonymous. This option inhibits companies from collecting personal information about your habits on the web.
Pavatars are a great and open alternative to Gravatar which makes you independent of a central and not working server because you host all Pavatars yourself.
Pavatars have all advantages of Favatars, but are bigger and you can use different Pavatars on one domain.
Because everyone hosts his/her own Pavatar on his/her own page, there is no need to sign in on external pages and wait for a activation.
A Pavatar must be a 80x80 px in either PNG, JPG or GIF format.
If you want to be recognized, you have to set up your homepage so it's Pavatar ready. This is not a big problem and there are multiple ways to do it:
- For geeks: add the X-Pavatar: http://example.com/path/my-pavatar.png header to your homepage.
- For webmasters: add this tag to your HTML:
<link rel="pavatar" href="http://example.com/path/my-pavatar.png" /> - For others: Upload your Pavatar with the name pavatar.png to your homepage.