I was working on my other blog a little while ago.
First off, Kiir noticed the avatars on someone else’s blog and realized that ours supports them by default. so she wanted an avatar. She went and set up her account, getting it all set up nicely with a nice pic, rebuilding it a few times as she figured out the (apparently undocumented) size she could use. Apparently it can take an 80×80 (gravatar this is) and it auto-resizes whenever someone requests a different size. More to the point, it takes the smaller image, resizes it UP to 80×80, and then can resize down. So her 50×50 didn’t turn out so well. Actually, I think 80×80 is what I told her from something I read after she did 50×50. I think she said it was noticeably larger still. So yeah.
Then she went to look at the blog. and her avatar wasn’t showing. So she was fiddling with her gravatar account and her commenters account. And there I am trying to get it working for her. I’m looking at the IMG SRC (which, it turns out, auto-rebuilds to the ACTUAL src, which was the fallback default, rather than the full URL, so that confused me for a bit). Then I’m digging through the code for the template, maybe guy broke it somewhere (yeah, because, you know, I’m the first person to ever try using gravatars on that theme). digging, looking, debugging, wtfing. Find the full URL. Falls back to the default. Try it piecemeal, and it worked all the way to the end. Seriously, it took me 10 minutes and I eventually fell back to using vi and diff to fin the difference between the working URL that I put together and the broken one that it was using.
Near as I can tell? One of them had ;r=G and the other had &r=G. There was also a difference in image sizes, technically. I don’t know which of them was the broken part. I’m guessing the & vs ;. But it works for the other persons avatar, so thats obviously not it either.
So then I’m looking at the admin options, because maybe this is some kind of cached response thing … or something. I finally turned off the default avatar, figuring maybe that’d flush whatever it was. And suddenly it worked! So I turned it back on, and it didn’t work anymore.
So, now, my other blog doesn’t have a default avatar. Not sure about this one yet. It doesn’t have any comments, so I’m not real concerned.