Sorry for being a pain but ... what gives ....

www.gravatar.com is broken at this moment with a 503 Service unavailable error and al of my default gravatar icons are showing a broken image! Not good :-(

There's a reason I didn't do this.  I'm open to suggestions for how to make it work though.

The reason is that if we want to ensure we display a default image instead of a broken image, we have to test gravatar.com before we load the page, every time we load the page.  The problem is that if gravatar.com is down or very slow, then the entire blog page is very slow and could timeout depending on server settings and other unpredicatable factors.

In my opinion, when gravatar shows broken images, that's a minor or trivial problem, but if the blog page is very slow or times out, that's a major problem.

Like I said, I'm open to a way around this, but at this point I think the current solution (just show a broken image) is the best solution.