I like new stuff. New stuff is good.

1. New WordPress plugin: Comment Instant Messenger Links. Registered users can now add their AIM and Yahoo! Messenger ids to their profile and those ids will be attached to their comments and will be visible to other registered users. The plugin is available for anyone to download. If you decide to use it on your own blog, I'd appreciate your feedback.

2. New gravatar option. Have you noticed that gravatars have been unreliable lately? The servers at gravatar.com have been dreadfully slow. When retrieving images, it's not uncommon for the gravatar servers to time out, return an error or return a blank image. On this blog I use a caching system that alleviates that somewhat, but I'm not completely insulated from the problems at gravatar.com.

   If you'd like, you can specify a "local gravatar," which I suppose would be technically just an avatar. For registered users, there's a Gravatar tab in your profile. You can use that tab to specify an avatar that will be used only on this blog. The interface doesn't include an upload, so you must provide the url to the location of an existing image. Supported are GIF, JPG, and PNG. Transparency and animation are also supported. If you make use of this feature, please make your image 50×50.

3. I was going to make use of this space to pimp a new renter. I opened for bids yesterday and was planning on choosing a new renter this morning. And now Blog Explosion is down. I can't access their site to accept a bid. Bitches.

   Blog Explosion finally came back up and I've now got a new renter.