Hella Hold'em

A few notable poker bloggers got blocked over the weekend by Blogger and locked out of their blogs. All seems to be operating normal today, but in case you missed it, Blogger has apologized for spam-blocking blogs.

We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

Kudos to Blogger for admitting the problem and apparently working quickly to clear it up. In a similar vein, it looks like they are working on some import/export tools that should make it easier to back up your blog's posts (should something similar ever happen again).

Well, I finally upgraded my old template to a Blogger Layout to take advantage of the ease of editing with widgets. I put all of my old code sections into widgets, and was quite happy - until I tried to install a new custom theme.

Silly me thought that widgets were modular and would just transfer over from layout to layout. Apparently, that is only true if you switch between one of the lame-o default layouts that Blogger provides. If I want to switch to a custom layout, I have to re-enter all of my widgets.

Ugh.

So that will be a project for another day. Until then, my apologies for the bland layout.

Does anybody have an email address or web link to report abuse to Gmail (Google)?

Their help documents on the subject are an endless circle of FAQ's that never appear to lead to the "form" that they want you to fill out. I can't find the form. Nor can I find an abuse related email address to write to.

Any help is appreciated. Thanks!