I had three different things hit around the same time on the blog.  Unfortunately, I went with the wrong diagnosis first…

• The family went down to Walt Disney World and the NAR convention a couple of weeks ago.  We thought we were going to have internet access, but ended up without it… and the blog wasn’t updated for 8 days.  After only missing a couple of days in the last year, I missed 8 in a row.  When I saw the traffic fall off at the same time, I attributed the fall-off to the lack of new content…
• I updated the WordPress platform a couple of days before the trip… and didn’t notice that after the update the permalinks weren’t working.  Whenever one entered a permalink, they were directed to an error page.  So, when I figured that out, I thought that might be why the traffic dropped off…
• Last night I found that my site was being redirected whenever it was coming from a search engine.  So, NO search engine traffic was actually getting to the site.  Direct traffic and those coming from other links WERE able to make it through… but Google, MSN, Yahoo and other search engines weren’t sending traffic.  I knew that if I lost all of my search engine traffic, that there would be a considerable drop in overall traffic.
  

The bottom line is that all three items contributed to the traffic situation.  By far the biggest is the loss of search engine traffic for two weeks.  The permalink failure was also a considerable blow to the traffic.  The content was important, but not nearly as much as the others.

The line even below the bottom line is that I want to apologize to anyone that had issues over the last couple of weeks accessing the site. As soon as I found out about the problems, I took measures to fix them… but I was terribly slow getting to the solutions.