For months — years, in fact — I used to get a ton of visitors to my blog from My Bottom Smarts; she maintained a blogroll applet on her site that would show previews of posts from bloggers in her selected blogroll, which I was a part of. Last November, Bonnie closed her blog and turned off the blogrolls to prevent malicious users from hijacking them once she stopped monitoring her blog altogether. I lost all of those visits.

I kept blogging, though. I’d been doing a post every weekday for years and I wasn’t going to stop.

Then Elon Musk bought Twitter and turned it into a shitpile (well, more of one than it had been in the past). Among other things, he started charging for API access. APIs, for those who don’t know, are the software packages that one uses to hook one site’s data to another. WordPress — the service I use to host my blog — has a product called Jetpack that was included in my paid tier which automatically posted blog entries to Twitter, using an API. The amount of blogs using this feature meant that WP would have to start paying for API usage, and instead of passing the cost onto their users, they decided to shut off Twitter integration altogether.

Now I’m going to lose those daily visitors as well. Not that there were a ton of them, but there were some. I can still manually post to Twitter every day, but odds are good I’ll forget from time to time.

It seems like everything keeps chipping away at the number of visitors I get. The loss of MBS was pretty bad, but the loss of Twitter hurts too. What next? Will the service that automatically notifies people via email when I post go away too? It’s not like the old days — my old blog, back in the 2000s, used to get hundreds of visitors a day, but it was a political/social/issues blog, and I just don’t care to write about that anymore, not when there are people with way better hot takes than I could ever have. Instead, I focus my attention on writing about writing, sex, erotica, polyamory, and of course spanking. Some people like reading my thoughts on the subject. If you’re reading this, you are one of them.

How can you help? I know you didn’t ask, but if you read a post you particularly enjoy, repost it on your social media of choice. Retweet my tweet, if I tweeted. Give me your reaction over on Fetlife. Text it to your friends or drop it in your group chat. Every little bit helps, especially when things continue chipping away at my viewership.