The SharePoint Swiss Army Knife

Boy, what a ride it has been! Can you believe this blog has crossed the 1 million views mark? It all started at the end of 2006, right around the beginning of the SharePoint/Office 2007 product cycles. After spending countless hours in newsgroups & SharePoint forums like MSDN and Tek-Tips giving and receiving help from others, I was inspired to set out with a New Year’s resolution in 2007 to start a blog of my own!

I must admit, those first couple months were pretty rough with the view stats and even made me question whether or not it was even worth writing this stuff! Luckily, I was able to look at it like an online notepad of my own, to record my own SharePoint findings to be referenced later on.  I was eventually spirited by some awesome questions and comments from all around the world and it was this thrill of being able to help others, regardless of what time zone they’re in, regardless of what language they spoke, that helped to define not only this blog but also myself and my role in the community.

If anyone needs a good reason to start a blog, I can definitely say that it has opened a tremendous number of opportunities for me through the years. It has not only helped to improve my writing, vocabulary and communication skills, but it has also enabled me to work with awesome companies, meet awesome people, speak at user groups, conferences, and even exposed me to world of authoring real books! So if you can bare the time to put your thoughts down in a blog, I’d highly recommend it. As long as you genuinely contribute to the community, the community will be genuinely generous to you.

But alas, all good things must come to an end right? No, I’m not giving up on SharePoint and I won’t stop contributing. But with the emergence of such great blogging communities like NBSP, the thriving MSDN forums and countless other SharePoint bloggers out there coupled with a slight shift in my own career priorities, the number of posts I put out will definitely be impacted. So with that said, I’ll leave you with some interesting stats about my blog below and see you when I see you!

Blog Started: January 2007

Blogging Platform: WordPress.com

Number of Posts: 141

Number of Comments: 1212

Top 5 Posts of All-Time:

1. How to move/migrate SharePoint list items/documents and preserve metadata properties at the same time : 254,433 (Accounts for about 25% of all views!)

2. How to Create Custom SharePoint 2010 Page Layouts using SharePoint Designer 2010 : 128,573

3. Importing User pictures from Active Directory to MOSS 2007 : 69,034

4. How to edit the form fields of a SharePoint List : 56,397

5. Alternate Access Mapping in SharePoint : 53,034

Total Ad Revenue: $108.86 – Was ad free until earlier this year. Click on those ads people!!!! 🙂