Frustrated with Blogger

Blogger is living a life of its own today. Half of my gadgets don't work, including the great "Random Posts" gadget that is very helpful in introducing people to my old posts. The "Followers" gadget has also been dead. I futzed with the template for an hour, trying to get the gadgets to work. Then I noticed that other blogs that use the Blogger platform have the same problem today. 

This is really annoying. I have observed that there are several moments during a year when you can increase your blog readership dramatically. January, March and August are the months when readers seem to roam the Internet in droves looking for new blogs to follow. 

See, for example, this graph of my blog stats from January 2010 until today: 

See what happened last March? The readership grew from 3,973 to 7,398. After a long and painful struggle with my rusty memory of what I learned about percentages in fifth grade, I think this means that the readership grew by 86.2% in that one month. (I'm mathematically challenged, so please correct me if I'm wrong here.) 

Of course, now that the gadgets are not functioning properly, I'm not sure there will be a rise in readership this March. And that annoys me.