A Graphical Example of the Value of Planet PowerShell

Posted on June 1, 2018 • 3 minutes • 446 words

Planet PowerShell is an aggregator of community blogs. Looking back at the commit history, it looks like this blog has been hooked up to it for a little over a year.

However the recent move back to Ghost resulted in my posts not coming through to Planet PowerShell. This little hiatus made me realize more than ever the value of the site.

If you have a #PowerShell blog, I can't overstate how valuable it is to get your feed hooked up to @planetpshell! If you need help figuring it out, get in touch.
— Josh (Windos) King (@WindosNZ) May 31, 2018

After sending out this tweet I figured that I really should put some numbers (or graphs) behind that statement.

The Normal Numbers

This blog is by no means the most trafficked site on the Internet, but I’m still floored by the number of people that visit.

Whenever a PowerShell post goes live, I can generally expect 40 to 70 hits that day. The following days see higher than normal traffic until it settles back down to the day to day “trickle.” You can see this pattern in this analytics graph:

The Planet PowerShell Effect

When my feed wasn’t going through to the site, the amount of traffic was noticeably diminished. You could see a little raise over the baseline when a new post went out, but nowhere near “normal.”

In this graph you can see a period without my feed working, when three new posts came out. Towards the end, you can see the immediate change when this was fixed, even though there were no new posts during that time.

Where Do the Numbers Come From?

Given that the site is just about PowerShell, it’s really easy to look to that for quality PowerShell content rather than finding and subscribing to individual blogs. There are a bunch of people doing just that, but that’s only part of the story.

There’s also a lot of people that have automation setup to post new content from Planet PowerShell on Twitter and Facebook. This puts links in front of tonnes of eyes.

Wrap Up

Like I said in the tweet at the top of this post, if you have a PowerShell blog you really should hook it up to Planet PowerShell. Doing so is a case of heading over to the GitHub repo and creating your own author file.

There are instruction in the repo’s README, but if you do need help getting it sorted please do reach out. I’m more than happy to help get you setup!

Also, remember that if you’re looking for PowerShell help , you can always find it on Twitter using #PSHelp !