Looking back on 2023: Site statistics

History has proven that posting top 10 lists detailing the most popular articles for the year on https://oofhours.com doesn’t draw many views. But I don’t care, I’m going to do it anyway. (Seriously, I don’t typically post anything for the views, it’s usually just something that interested me at the time, or something that I wanted to be able to find later.)

This year’s top 10 posts are dominated by older stuff, with 7 out of the top 10 being from previous years:

1. Windows Autopilot diagnostics: Digging deeper. From July 2020, this introduced the Get-AutopilotDiagnostics.ps1 script (although now you should use Get-AutopilotDiagnosticsCommunity.ps1). Even though Autopilot added a built-in diagnostics feature, it’s not proven to be very useful overall so this script remains popular. In combination with that, I would also recommend Petri Paavola’s Get-IntuneManagementExtensionDiagnostics script that digs deeper into the IME logs.
2. Troubleshooting Windows Autopilot Hybrid Azure AD Join. Another older post from July 2020. The marketing message might be to move to Azure AD Join, which is a fine goal, but there are still plenty of organizations that are not ready for that yet and are wanting to use Autopilot with Active Directory. This post talks about some of the challenges that you will run into, all of which are reasonably easy to solve. See #5 below which has a list of suggestions to help.
3. Renaming Autopilot-deployed Hybrid Azure AD Join devices. Another older post, this one from May 2020. The naming convention for Autopilot-deployed HAADJ devices really sucks (you can specify a prefix and the Intune Connector for AD adds a random suffix to create a 15-character name). If you don’t like that, you can rename the device later; this blog describes how. Interestingly, a newer post from October 2023 uses a slightly different technique and also extends the renaming to Azure AD Join (where it’s actually easier).
4. Forcing an MDM sync from a Windows 10 client. Another old one, from September 2019. It still works in Windows 11, and there’s still no better way to do it locally on the device.
5. What’s wrong with Hybrid Azure AD Join? See #2. The biggest thing to review
6. Get-WindowsAutopilotInfo.ps1 updated, by Microsoft this time. There were some fun times in 2023: Azure AD discontinued some of the older methods for accessing AAD via Graph APIs, and even with well over a year of advanced warning the Autopilot-related scripts weren’t updated to reflect this. Microsoft did eventually fix these, but it was bumpy for a bit. And the eventual fixes weren’t perfect (e.g. module dependencies are configured correctly), so the community versions are generally better.
7. Digging into Hybrid Azure AD Join. See a theme here?
8. Automatically setting up OneDrive for Business via Intune. The oldest of the bunch, from July 2019. Apparently the process is no easier today.
9. Another Windows media creation tool? Sure, why not. One of these days, Microsoft will release a version of the Media Creation Tool for ARM64 devices. Until then, you can use mine. (All the content is available, they just haven’t published a binary.)
10. Installing Windows updates during a Windows Autopilot deployment. The ability to install Windows updates during Autopilot has been on the feature backlog for years; maybe 2024 will finally be the year that it’s officially supported. Until then, this post describes a scripted way of doing it with a PowerShell script that uses PSWindowsUpdate, wrapped into a Win32 app that can be delivered via Intune. It works, but it takes forever — let’s hope the official version is faster.

Looking at how people are finding posts on the site, it probably comes as no surprise that a significant percentage come from Google Search. But here’s the full of the “top 5” list:

1. Google Search. 60% of the referral traffic comes from Google.
2. Reddit. 8% of the traffic puts it in a distant second. (I guess I should pay more attention to Reddit.)
3. Bing. 7%. I would not have guessed that 🙂
4. Twitter. 6%. This has been going down year over year as others go up.
5. Learn.microsoft.com. 5%. Yes, Microsoft’s official documentation is the #5 referrer, with about the same number of clicks as Twitter.
6. WordPress Android App. 5%. Thanks to the people who have subscribed to the site via the WordPress app and read the posts in the app.
7. static.teams.cdn.office.net. 3%. This is a weird one: my guess is that this is a conglomeration of people who are clicking links embedded in Word documents that are hosted in Teams or SharePoint.
8. LinkedIn. 2%. This is probably the most surprising one: Either the WordPress stats are wrong or people don’t click links from LinkedIn.
9. Facebook. 1%. Not surprising, given that there isn’t a particularly strong tech community on Facebook.

It’s a very long tail after that. I’m not 100% confident in that data, but getting something more accurate than WordPress/JetPack is more trouble than it’s worth.

A country view doesn’t show any major surprises:

Although the countries with one single click are interesting:

All total, I did 41 posts during 2023, and they often came in bunches (roughly corresponding to presentations that I was doing at a variety of events — if I’m going to do the work, I might as well get a blog post out of it at the same time). I expect that 2024 will result in at least as many posts, on an equally-scattered set of topics. We’ll see if any new posts can dethrone the reigning top 10 above.