Thank you. I was looking in the theme settings and had forgotten about the widgets. BUT – it was listed as 3 (but I was getting 4 blog posts), so I tested it and changed it to 6, and I got 6 posts; changed it back to 3, and got 4 posts, so changed it to 2, and got 3 posts. So that is a fix … but
As I say it had been fine for years. I presume it must be a conflict unless you have heard of anything like this before?
Yes it works on the shortcodes page that comes with the theme http://conduitcomms.com/shortcodes/
but I guess we are doing something wrong but I can’t see what.