Blogging Woes ~ A plea for help

I am about to throw in the towel on Blogger!  After blogging for just over a decade, I suddenly no longer understand Blogger at all.  Today, I took a bit of a memory walk down my blogging history timeline.  When I did that, I knew for sure I am not ready to give up blogging, but I also knew I needed to reach out to those of you still blogging on a regular basis and see if you could give me some support and answer some questions for me.

My desk is way too clean, and my computer is lonely because I never touch her anymore.  She wants me to start writing blog posts again.

Here are some of some stats about my blog:

• I have published 346 blog posts!  That amazes me. 
• According to Blogger, my first blog post, published June 25, 2008, had nine (9) views.
• My next post, was not published until November of 2008.  It had 24 views.
• It was not until October of 2009 that I had any readers outside the family whom actually left a comment on my blog.  
• My first real follower, or reader, was Jann from www.benchmark60.blogspot.com.  She identified herself as #1Nana.  We became blog friends and later met in person more than once when we joined other bloggers for a weekend on Vashion Island.  We called ourselves the Vashionistas.

  

  The first Vasionista Gathering in 2012
  Sandi, Deb, Linda, DJan, and Jann

Bloggers blogging at a blogger gathering.
The Vashionistas at the second gathering in 2013
Jann, Sally, Deb

• After my daughter died unexpectedly in June of 2010, the blogging community became a great source of support.  As I blogged of my experience, I gained not only readers, but great compassionate support from the blogging community.  
• I have never understood the way spammer affect the numbers of views that a blog would have, but I know that as my views grew into the hundreds of views for one post, that I had spammers because I would get nonsense type comments.  
• Throughout 2012 and 2013, I regularly had between 400 and 500 views of each post, and I would publish at least 20+ comments for each post.  I would not publish comments that appeared to be spam.
• The top number of views that I had for any one post, was 14,778.  This post was commented on by 63 people, but I only published about 30 of those comments because of some the attacks that readers made on the comments of others.  This post, a remembrance,  was written after the death Kara Tippets, a dear, and much loved woman, whom had great influence me and so many others as she battled breast cancer.
• I have used comments moderation since I very first started blogging.
• My 70th birthday post written three years ago had 988 views.  
• Travel posts and posts about family in 2016 continued to show high numbers of nearly 2,000 views throughout 2016.
• Admittedly, I lost interest in blogging in 2017, and stopped posting on a regular basis.  One would expect readership to go down.  The views appear to have been in the 300 - 500 views per post range.  I continued to get a lot of comments.
• Then, suddenly, the views seemed to stop, as did the comments.

I have never been concerned about numbers of followers, viewers, or readers.  Numbers just never mattered.  I was not using the blog as a source of income.  I did not sign-up for adsense.  I saw blogging as a way to stay connected to the broader world.  I have made friends through blogging, but some of those friends stopped blogging for a variety of reasons.  Blogging takes time and commitment and many just decided to stop spending time on blogging.

Blogging brought many people into my life whom I would never have met any other way.  Many fellow bloggers became great friends.  Many I have never met in the flesh, but we correspond on a more personal basis through Facebook, or by email.  I know many of my blogging friends better than I know most of my neighbors.  In fact, I keep up with their lives more avidly that I keep up with the lives of family members.  Blogging does that.  It is a place we gather socially and share the stories of our lives.  That is what I love about blogging.

In the time that I was being a bit of a slacker with blogging and not reading or writing posts, it seems like the blogging world turned upside down on me.  I no longer understood Blogger at all.   Here is what I have been experiencing:

• I can no longer post comments on blogs I have read for years.  
• Not only that, I am getting virtually no comments at all on my posts.  I wondered if my blogging friends were mad at me.  Had I offended everyone somehow???
• I noticed it seems my posts are no longer appearing on Blogger Reading List.
• I wondered if I had messed everything up when I switched over to Google+, so I stopped posting using Blogger.
• Then, I went back to using Blogger only to post and did not use Google+. 
•  I’m so confused.
• A dear reader wrote me a private email and told me she could not post to my blog because I needed a gmail address.  (I had a gmail address and thought it was linked to my blog.)
• I did a bit of reading about the need to switch to make sure I was publishing using https.  Ok, that is when I really get confused!  

I thought I would just be done with Blogger and start all over.  I considered using Squarespace, or Wordpress, or whatever.  I thought of hiring someone to create a website for my blog.  I thought of throwing the computer through the window!  

Finally, I bought an ebook on how to fix the mess I could not understand on blogger.  Now, I need to hire someone to tell me what the ebook is saying!  I don’t get it.  Maybe Blogger has truly left me behind.  Maybe I should just sign off and never blog again, but I’m really not ready to so that.  

So, please, those of you out there among my blogging friends, forgive me for not commenting on your blogs.  If I must comment by using a Google identity, I can’t seem to leave a comment.  

I miss seeing comments on my blog and wonder if comments have been left and then lost in space somewhere.  One woman said that one day, after weeks and weeks of never getting comments, she got all of weeks and weeks of comments in one day.  

In conclusion, if you have read all of this and are still with me, please send help!  What did you do when blogger made all of the recent changes?  Did you change anything?  What am I doing wrong?

I will be forever grateful for any advice you can give me.  I haven’t given up yet.  I hope to be up and running at full speed soon.  It is discouraging to write posts when they seem to be flung to the universe and never make it to readers.  

Thanks again for all of your loyal support in the past.