State of the Gravatar

I spent a bunch of time today working on the avatar serving script, trying to optimize it a little and get the gray/black box issue sorted out. While it seems to work for the most part now, I’ve still been experiencing some strangeness from it on occasion. Often clearing your cache or a refresh or two will bring a munged avatar back to life, which makes no sense at all. I’ve implemented an If-Modified-Since handler that will return 304 Not Modified if the requested avatar has not been changed since the last time your browser downloaded it (assuming your browser supports IMS headers). Hopefully this will cut bandwidth usage quite a bit and free up some server resources so this thing will survive until G2. Thanks to everyone who was supportive during the last week, it means everything to me; and a special thanks to all who have donated recently despite the quirkiness of the gravatar universe. You guys rock!