<p>I just posted the question <a href="https://stackoverflow.com/questions/246575/how-to-determine-why-the-browser-keeps-trying-to-load-a-page">how-to-determine-why-the-browser-keeps-trying-to-load-a-page</a> and discovered that my problem is with Gravatar.  </p>

<p>I also noticed that StackOverflow is suffering from the same outage.  </p>

<p>Does anyone know of a <strong>graceful</strong> way to determine if Gravatar, or any third party website for that matter, is up or not, <strong>before</strong> trying to retrieve avatar icons from them?  </p>

<p>This would eliminate the long page load and the never ending busy cursor ... I shouldn't say never ending ... it just takes <strong>a long time</strong> to go away and is very confusing to the user as they sit there and wait ... for nothing.</p>

You can have a different process that is periodically checking the status of the site. Set a rule about what is down for you, for instance you could say: "ping time > 1500 ms = down". Have this process to leave a note in a database table or config file. Then you check this value on each page rendering at almost no cost.
Depending on how critical is this external site, you can do the check more or less often.
This process could be an out of the web stack program, or a page only accessible through localhost that gets executed via Scheduled Tasks or an ASP.NET facility like mentioned in the comments.