Happy Belated Birthday to SmellyBlog!
SmellyBlog was born a year and two days ago, on February 26th. It's so easy to forget a birthday for a blog, but it's impossible forget blogging! I went by the 26th without as much as a brief mention of this at all. I can only hope that my intensive blogging can make up for such negligence on my behalf.

To add to the mess, I spent half of the day in PANIC, as I discovered this morning that my blog was temporarily locked due to one of the google robots suspecting it to be a spam blog. This is the message you get when that happens:

"This blog has been locked by Blogger's spam-prevention robots. You will not be able to publish your posts, but you will be able to save them as drafts. Save your post as a draft or click here for more about what's going on and how to get your blog unlocked".

When you click on the "click here" it will prompt you to enter a visual identification and your email address (or username if you are still using the "old blogger". You will than be in the mercy of the blogger "humans" when they find the time to review your blog and whitelist it.
I hope this never happens to those of you who have a real blog (i.e. not a spam blog). But if it does, there is no phone number to call (I even tried calling Google Ads in my despair!). I recommend to just wait patiently and use the time where you can't blog to clean your house and go over useful information on this group:
Blogger Help Group

The other two website that the Google Ads lady referred me to proved to be of no use whatsoever:
Blogger Help (if you can find your way and figure out who to contact in that maze, please let me on your secret!)
Known Issues for the New Blogger

At 2:48pm I finally got a notification from Blogger that my blog is cleared:
"Your blog has been reviewed, verified, and cleared for regular use so that
it will no longer appear as potential spam. If you sign out of Blogger and
sign back in again, you should be able to post as normal. Thanks for your
patience, and we apologize for any inconvenience this has caused".

Now that this is all over, I can focus on celebrating SmellyBlog's birthday with you. An exciting birthday preset for SmellyBlog is on it's way - a brand-new logo and look!

You are invited to celebrate with us and let us know which you think is the most suitable gift for my fabulous web-pet: Vote for your favourite SmellyBlog logo and get entered to win a juiceful bottle of Opium Fleur Imperiale!

How to vote?
The following three posts are the outline for three different logos for SmellyBlog. Comment on the one that is your favourite and the one that you think represents SmellyBlog's personality the best - and you will be entered into the draw.