While listening to the Browns game today, I tried my hand at figuring out the stack overflow errors that were being generated by the MyAvatars plugin. No matter what I tried, the damn thing kept spitting out those errors. I tried deleting bits and pieces of the code, but each time I did so, the Gravatar function didn’t work or some part of the plugin would ruin the page.

So I opted to try out a few other Gravatar based plugins. The ones I tried are as follows:

• Filosofo Gravatars

• Gravatar (and userpics)

• Gravatar Signup

The first one is more of a programmer’s type plugin. Unless you know how the code works with the various ARRAYS and configurable strings, you’ll have a hard time getting the block of code correct. The next two didn’t work out exactly as I wanted either. I also tried Doug’s EasyGravatars plugin. EasyGravatars worked well, except that it was hard to place it where I wanted in conjunction with everything else I have in comments.php. So after tinkering all day with this crap, I finally settled on something called MBLA.

MBLA stands for MyBlogLogAvatars. This is a newer version of the MyAvatars code base which hasn’t been updatd for over a year.

Use avatars from services like Gravatar and MyBlogLog in your posts, comments and pingbacks. Remember to change options at Options -> MBLA. By Jan Olsen.

After a bit of configuring, I’ve finally managed to display the Gravatar for anyone that has one. If you don’t have a Gravatar assigned to your email address you use to comment on the blog, head to http://www.gravatar.com and make one. It’s quick, easy and free. I’m gonna support Gravatars at the very least. Not sure about MyBlogLog avatars.