This post was most recently updated on February 26th, 2023.
5 min read.The year 2018 is drawing to an end, and it’s a good time for some reflection on what an interesting year it’s been! Personally, quite a few things have happened in the last 12 months – I moved to Canada, started a new/old job, became a father, spoke at awesome events, and met a lot of cool people – just tons of awesome stuff. But personal things aside, 2018 has been an interesting and rewarding time to be writing this blog!
2018 was the year when the site kind of took off. Before, I’d been writing only occasionally, and mainly to document my findings. It’s been a great way to organize my thoughts, and get Google to index them – making them easy to search afterwards :)
This year, however, the blog’s been found by something of a bigger general public – developing from a couple of thousands of monthly visitors at the beginning of the year, to a bit over 10 000 unique visits per month for the last half of the year.
So, at this part of the year, I think it’s a good time to take a break from looking at SharePoint, Azure AD and dev stuff – and instead, take a look at YOU – the reader of this blog.
You, dear reader, are what motivates this ongoing documentation effort. But who are you, really? Who am I writing for?
Some statistics about YOU
So, this blog originally started as a form of a trove of public documentation primarily for me. But nowadays, it’s evolved into something a bit more!
In my earlier life, I used to be a PHP developer. Tweaking and twisting WordPress has also been fun, even if it’s a frustrating beast to deal with. It’s far simpler than SharePoint, though, so it’s borderline relaxing :) Having been interested in Google Analytics (and such user analytics tools), I also find great joy in getting at least a vague idea, of who’s visiting my blog.
So, who’s visiting the blog? Who are you?
Let’s use a map (from Google Analytics) to get a bit of an idea of where you all come from.
In short, you come from all around the world! I was really surprised to learn, that Finland (the Fatherland) isn’t even in the top 10 (it’s number 17):
- USA
- India
- UK
- Germany
- Canada (!)
- Australia
- France
- Netherlands
- Brazil (I get most of the big traffic sources, but I’m a bit surprised about this!)
- Spain
Apparently, my fellow Finns aren’t that keen on visiting my site, but the residents of my new home country, Canada, are all over the site – cool! But weirdly, according to Alexa, the country my blog is the most popular in, is in fact Iran. That’s the 23rd biggest source of the traffic to my site – and roughly 10% of the visitors are returning. That’s slightly more than on average, as my site gets the vast majority of visitors by offering one-off solutions to one-off issues.
I’m happy to hear, that my topics – Azure AD, SharePoint, .NET development etc – are relevant and interesting in Iran as well as many other countries, even if it’s a bit surprising! So – hi to all of you from Iran! Cool to see you here.
But what else do I know about my visitors?
Looking at the home networks, you come from so many different places it doesn’t make sense to really list them (20 476 different providers altogether – plus the ones that don’t have anything set)! I’d love to list a few, that I find interesting, though!
- Microsoft (multiple different country subsidiaries) – about 2.8 % of visitors
- That’s thousands of people from the company, that’s the tech stack I mostly rant about. Makes you kind of self-conscious, doesn’t it?
- If you’re from Microsoft – sorry. I actually like your products, otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing about them!
- We cool? We cool.
- Amazon (multiple different country subsidiaries) – about 1.5 % of visitors
- Amazon is more or less the main competitor to Microsoft’s cloud business, as AWS is the biggest provider in the same space Azure operates. It’s even more interesting to see you googling for “how to enable custom scripts on SharePoint On-Premises sites”…
- Most Fortune 500 companies use SharePoint, so I guess it’s not surprising that Amazon does as well!
Additional tidbit of information: Most of you use Google Chrome (~75%) on Windows (~90%). Even if I write about Microsoft-related topics, not that many users stick to Edge or Internet Explorer… :)
But what are you looking for?
My website is almost ridiculously focused on problem-solving. I simply document the solutions I find. But which solutions have the most people been interested in? That’s easy to get from website stats! See below:
- This post about running code-first Migrations for ASP.NET MVC projects using Entity Framework was my most-read article – some 9% of you visited this page!
- Another hit was the post about AADSTS65001 (admin consent issues), as about 5% of you visited that article.
- Roughly as popular was my post about how to fix the annoying error ” – – the website does not support SharePoint Online credentials.”
- There are a few other articles with more than 2% of visitors checking them out, but since I now have well over a hundred articles, most of them were only visited by less than 2% of you.
I’ve been talking about you a lot now – let’s take a quick look into what I’ve gotten from the blog in 2018!
Learnings
Time for some self-reflection:
What have I learned in 2018 by blogging?
Any time I document something publicly, I feel like I really, REALLY have to make it more readable, more easily understood, and more comprehensive than I’d need to if I was just writing it to myself. That drives me to improve my writing, and document things better. In the long run, that helps me, too – a lot, I’ve noticed!
Moreover, I’ve gotten feedback on the articles in the comments section, on Twitter, on LinkedIn, face-to-face, via email and the contact form of the site – overall, I’ve been able to improve a lot of the articles with the help of the greater community.
Some closing words
It’s been a humbling journey – and perhaps the best part of it has been getting more and more feedback on the articles. I’ve learnt a lot not only about the topics I’m writing about, but also about how to interact with the community, what to write about, and how to write about it.
Knowing that most of these articles are read by thousands of visitors makes me put more thought into them, and spend some more time writing. In the long run, I believe this also improve the quality – or at least that’s my solemn hope :)
So – thank you for 2018. Please be sure to come back in 2019, too! ;)
He's been a developer from 2004 (starting with PHP and Java), and he's been working on .NET projects, Azure, Office 365, SharePoint and a lot of other stuff. He's also Microsoft MVP for Azure.
This is his personal professional (e.g. professional, but definitely personal) blog.
- M365 Copilot claiming “You have turned off web search in the work mode”? Easy fix! - November 19, 2024
- “Performing cleanup” – Excel is stuck with an old, conflicted file and will never recover. - November 12, 2024
- How to add multiple app URIs for your Entra app registration? - November 5, 2024
