Shuffle Me This

Eureka! I think I've got it!

For weeks now, I've been trying to get me a gravatar. Now that I've outed myself by showing The Face (and The Body) I figured I might as well step all the way through the door and associate The Face with all of my blogging interactions - posts and comments.

I created my gravatar and got a rating and then ... nothing. I followed the directions on how to enable gravatars when using Blogger, and since I use Haloscan as my comment host, I went there to see if there was a switch that needed to be flipped. I found my way easily enough to the Beta settings tab and tried to plunk down my gravatar URL.

Ran into a little glitch - the URL was too long. No problem. Being the resourceful gal that I am, I went into the Haloscan forums and queried the good folks there. Someone pointed me to tinyurl.com so I skipped over there and got a (you guessed it) tinyurl for my gravatar.

Back to Haloscan and drop in my new tinyurl. Nothing happens. I give up for a week or so. But then I see that in addition to Maria, now Amanda and Scooterdeb and John have gravatars. I simply cannot be left out!

I try again. Create a new gravatar. Snag a tinyurl. Put the link in the Haloscan settings. Suddenly I have a gravatar! But wait ... it's a default gravatar. Now every comment without a gravatar has The Face staring back from it. Not what I wanted. I trash the tinyurl and fret and fume some more. I do NOT want to have to ask for help.

But earlier today I caved and asked Maria for help. She said that she didn't do anything via Haloscan and asked me if I had uploaded my photo to gravatar.com. Yup, been there, done that. But I'll go back and look again.

So I go to gravatar.com and I surf through the site again. I see that they are having a contest to win an iPod Shuffle, and all you have to do to enter is to write a post about something related to the blogosphere, and include at least one mention of gravatars. Apparently that was just the motivation I needed, because all of a sudden it dawned on me ...

... when I created my gravatar, I had to set up an account using my email address. My gravatar was linked to my email address! I went back and checked my blogger account. You guessed it - the email address did not match!

When I created my blog on January 31, 2004 I didn't have a GMail account. Because GMail was launched on April 1, 2004. Exactly one year ago today. My Blogger account still used my old myway.com email address. By making sure that my Blogger account was updated with my current GMail address, I believe I have solved the problem of the missing gravatar.

After all this, it would be a cruel April Fools Day joke not to reward me with that free iPod shuffle. Especially since I've had such bad luck scoring winning Pepsi caps.