Welcome to the third version of our About The New Leaf Journal page. This page comes to you from Nicholas A. Ferrell, the editor and administrator of The New Leaf Journal. I have also written the vast majority of New Leaf Journal articles, but we feature numerous contributions from my good friend and colleague, Victor V. Gurbo. Below, I will explain what The New Leaf Journal is, what you can expect to find here, and why you may want to follow us. Also see our new FAQ page for additional information.

N.A. Ferrell's 2007 photo of cherry blossoms at the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.
Photo taken by N.A. Ferrell on April 26, 2007. Edited for publication by V. Gurbo.

What is The New Leaf Journal?

The New Leaf Journal is a self-hosted WordPress-powered online writing magazine. I launched the site on April 27, 2020. I created the project to host my own writing and that of my friends, which (as of this date) includes Victor V. Gurbo.

The New Leaf Journal has no grand mission. We write about what we want to write about. We have published more than 900 articles, so I will not list them all here (see our archives as well as our short Leaflet and Leaf Bud sections). Instead, I will post links below of 21 articles that should highlight the fact that my writing interests are varied:

My colleague, Victor V. Gurbo, has not published as frequently as I have. But he too writes about a number of subjects. See six examples of his work below:

The 27 links listed above are just a small sample of our writing here at The New Leaf Journal. While I doubt that any person who comes across this sample will be interested in every single topic (although I would be happy to be surprised), I like to think that our determination to write about what we are interested in means that there is something for everyone. This is where our site motto, Where the leaves are perennially virid, comes into play. Regardless of what we write about, we try to bring a fresh, virid perspective, to every article we publish.

In addition to my starter list, there are plenty of ways to get to know our article library:

  • Follow links in our articles, you may even find some interesting external sites
  • Follow me on X, Mastodon, and/or NOSTR for several links each week
  • Go to our article archives page (being re-built) for a list of all of our article and short post titles
  • Make use of our category and tag links with each article – I try to use tags in a way that is helpful to visitors (also see our most-common tags)
  • See the related posts underneath each article (actual relatedness may vary)
  • Subscribe to our weekly newsletter (we also have a no-email RSS option) for links to our new articles and links from our archive
  • Use our on-site search to test queries of interest to you

If all else fails, feel free to send me an email with requests or questions and I will get back to you.

Why You Should Consider Following Us

On this point, I prefer to let our articles speak for themselves. If you find enough of interest, I hope you consider following our project. We usually publish somewhere in the neighborhood of 3-5 articles every week, although there is no set schedule.

I will note two points beyond our articles.

Firstly, I encourage readers to follow The New Leaf Journal via feed and make available full-text RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds for those of you who use feed readers (see our feed list). Our site can also be followed from ActivityPub clients (@newleafjournal) and TWTXT. For those of you who do not use feeds, fediverse clients, or TWTXT, you can bookmark our homepage or subscribe to our newsletter, wherein I share our newest articles every Saturday. I am always looking to create different ways for people to follow The New Leaf Journal and related projects.

Secondly, while it is always a work in progress, I have put quite a bit of work into ensuring that The New Leaf Journal works without JavaScript and in all web browsers, including niche ones. We do not use ads or third-party trackers. I explained how our local page counting solution, Koko Analytics, works in a dedicated article and review.

But in the end, our project is about writing (and sometimes photos). If you like what we do, we would be happy to have you as a regular reader. If you very much like what we do, feel free to write us and share our articles with your friends and family or with the wider world (our social media presence is on the modest side).

See Our Sister Site

In September 2023, I started a sister site called The Emu Café Social, which is inspired by our own Emu Café section. That site focuses on short-format posts and social publishing (primarily Fediverse). I hope to get some more writers for that than what we have at The New Leaf Journal. Going forward, I will work on integrating the projects. If you like The New Leaf Journal, I hope you give The Emu Café Social a look too (see its About Page).

Speaking for myself, I post in a number of places around the web. See my New Leaf Journal profile page for more information.

Taking Leaf

Thank you for taking the time to read our About Page. I learned that some people found the previous version, seen here, a bit confusing (it was arguably on the stiff side). I thought that a re-design was in order for that reason and also because I published the former version in 2021. If you have any thoughts or questions, my webmaster contact information is on our Contact Page.

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