Happy new year

I like to take the end of the year to reflect a little on the year that’s passed, and since last year I didn’t publish anything of that sort, I’ll do it this year. Tomorrow is the first day of the year, and it’s good to start with the right foot, but since tomorrow I won’t post here, I wish you a happy new year!

The site

Last year was good for this site. I had a huge growth of new users and, especially motivating for me, returning users. It’s amazing to think that something that I do to have some fun and learn new stuff really helps people. The next graph shows the jump from 2002 until today.

The structure will continue the same as the UX/UI of the website. I’ll try to keep things consistent, and I think I now have a good compromise between surfacing content that you may find interesting and the site looking good.

December is always a month that people take off and spend time with families, so the drop is expected.

Another graph that I find funny is the following:

The graph above shows the page views for the website. They follow the thread above, but the up and down shows that my website is really for people that work during the week. The drops that you see are weekends, and that’s also understandable for a tech blog.

The content

Currently, I’m publishing 6 articles a week.

2 big ones regarding the Power Platform
3 with recommendations for tools, books, and podcasts
1 small one with reference material

It’s quite a challenge to come up with content to write, but thankfully there’s always new stuff showing up and new questions that people ask me that make for good articles (in my opinion, of course).

This year the most popular articles were a mix of reference and tutorials, but the 3 most popular didn’t change:

Power Automate: Access an Excel with a dynamic path (tutorial)
Power Automate: formatDateTime Function (reference)
Power Automate: addDays Function (reference)

Here’s the top list:

Notice that the % are quite low, meaning that people read most of the articles, which is the most common. I like this because there’s no “one-hit wonder,” and all of them are useful to a degree.

The elephant

I waited until half the article to talk about the “elephant in the room.” The pandemic made 2020 unprecedented in all measurable topics, and not all of them good. Many people suffered the impacts of it, and my heart goes to all of them. Keeping safe is as important as ever, especially now that the mass vaccination started. If you’re reading this in a few years, I hope you look back to a dark time and that we recovered already from it.

Affiliates and Privacy

2020 was the year where I got rid of affiliate links. Most people make some money with them, but the feeling was always creepy on my side. I was giving Amazon and others information about what you would like, and that wasn’t sitting right with me. I’m still purging the website, so it won’t stay there long if you see one.

Also, I still have Google Analytics on my website that is a huge source of information flowing to Google that needs to be removed. I’ll probably work on it in 2021, but I needed to know what to write about and what things that people enjoyed more.

I want your privacy to be kept as much as possible, and that’s why I don’t have a newsletter. Marketing people are screaming at the screen right now, but privacy is more important for me than making a “quick buck” at the readers’ expense.

2021

Next year I’ll continue pushing myself to get you the best content I can. I’ll continue with the lineup as it is now:

Monday: Teams, Forms, and Planner.
Tuesday: Power Automate, Power Apps, and SharePoint.
Wednesday: Tools Recommendations.
Thursday: Power Automate Reference, Power Apps Reference, and SharePoint Reference.
Friday: Books Recommendations.
Saturday: Podcast Recommendations.

I have other topics that I want to explore, like Power BI and Microsoft Graph, both of my recent interest in knowing more about the overall Power Platform. I still don’t know where to fit them, but I’ll find a way. Say posted.