Later for Gravatar.
I must apologize to Blue Girl, Theresa, Ron and everyone who went at my insistence to gravatar.com and got their own Gravatars. I have been forced to disable Gravatars on revision99, because it was causing the site to be verrry slow. It went like this:
Once I had enabled Gravatars on this site, every time one of you Precious Few would leave a comment, the machinery in the basement of revision99 World Headquarters would call gravatar.com and request an image. If there was an image, it would retrieve it and display it next to your comment. If no image, well, we still had to go look. All of this took time. And even though revision99 saved a copy of your image and reused it instead of getting it fresh each time from gravatar.com, there were still those who didn’t have a Gravatar, and we had to go check that out every time. And I suspect the system actually went and checked for images even if all you wanted to do was view a page. And because the Gravatar server is overloaded and overworked and stressed out and bogged down, all of this image searching and retrieval was taking a long damn time.
The result was that I lost almost all my readers (I think), because no one had time to wait for this procedure to take place just to get a chance to see the latest stupid stuff I was writing about. Can’t say I blame anyone, but please come back!!!
Don’t worry — if you signed up for a Gravatar, you still have one, and it will show up in Haloscan comments and other sites that have Gravatars enabled. And in the future I will give gravatar another try, because they claim to be working on an upgrade that will make everything speedy again, or maybe because I will try a different way of enabling them that doesn’t take so long to work each time. Stand by for that announcement, but don’t hold your breath.
In the meantime, revision99 — minus the pictures and Sock Puppet Bunnies — is quite snappy these days. No need to make a pot of coffee before checking it out, and as always, my heart beats only for you.
So that’s what was wrong! You don’t know how many times I just left after waiting for the comment section to o-o-o-o-o-o-pen.
This is much better.
Wow! So quick!
Gee, all this time, I thought it was me that was the problem. I’m glad for the explanation and the speedy change.
And don’t worry, even though I seem to go AWOL occasionally, I won’t leave you. You’ll have to carry me out of the Revision99 doors kicking and screaming to get rid of me.
My oh my oh my! And Sock Puppet, too. You’ll drive us to drinking whiskey.
I thought of mentioning to you that things were taking longer than Cardinal Mahoney’s jail sentence, but I remained silent. I didn’t want to whine. In the end, I found solace in my suffering.
It didn’t occur to me that there could be a REASON for a problem and an ACTUAL SOLUTION to that problem.
You have destroyed my faith in entropy, my comfort with chaos, and my acceptance of the general decline of all that was good.
Now I feel compelled to find some actual solutuion in my own life. Damn you!
Yup – it’s definitely faster now. Too bad, really, because I like the pictures. I want to know what all of you look like. You can email your head shots to jones@your shorts revision99.com (first you’ll have to remove your shorts).
Caravana Basura – In fact this is the only problem in life I have ever encountered that has a solution. Most just have workarounds. So don’t feel guilty about your inaction.
Good work, Scooby.
My man, Larry J. You should look into Kip Bond’s Gravatars2. It has quite a few solid improvements over Skippy’s plugin. The caching feature is especially useful. Kip updates pretty regularly to keep pace with the ever increasing level of suck at gravatar.com.
Thanks, Laurie!
Joefish – Glad you stopped by! I’m a bit disillusioned by the whole Gravatar thing, and so not that hot to dive right back in. I don’t have any training in server management or programming, but the problems at gravatar.com seem to have been going on far too long, and I’ve lost confidence. I’m grateful to anyone who tries to do something (like Gravatar) as a public service, but as you say, there is an ever-increasing level of suck, and it hurts those of us who run our own blogs on shared hosts. If you read my original posts on this subject, you know that I was enthusiastic about the idea at one time. Not so much now. But thanks for the pointer. Once I see that Gravatar is running smoothly, I’ll try the G2 plugin.