Staring in August 2020, I have published a month-end review article close to the end of the month (or close to the middle in the case of October 2023). As you can see, this month-in-review is a bit different. It is a month[s]-in-review.
I had a significant amont of work to do at my day job as the calendar turned from April to May. Moreover, I was traveling to Texas on May 7 and needed to complete a few of my assignments before leaving. As a result, I did not do much work on The New Leaf Journal for the first two-thirds of May. By that point, it seemed a little bit late to publish an April review. Taken together with the fact that a May review would not be long, I decided to combine the months into a single, super review.
April showers bring May flowers. See? They go together.
Without further ado, I present our month[s] in review.
NLJ Leaves From April & May
I wrote all of our April and May articles. Below, you will find them in chronological order from April 1 to Ma 31 with my brief commentary.
- NYC Board of Elections Pigeon Mailer (Our meaningless New York presidential primaries already feel like they took place a long time ago)
- March 2024 at The New Leaf Journal (Just to remind you how dull only reviewing one month is)
- Palworld Article Feed Reader Filter Evasion (How to avoid Palworld spam in a feed reader collection)
- Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki – S2 Review (You should expect a follow-up to my review in the next few weeks)
- Google Search and Independent Websites (Google has not been too kind to us either in the last few weeks)
- Defining Maria Sakamaki Syndrome (I used my review of Collage, an excellent freeware visual novel, to offer a critique of a certain unfortunate character-writing issue)
- La’s Silver Hair in True Remembrance (A visual novel hair color study stemming off my review of the classic doujin visual novel, True Remembrance)
- The Eclipse Seen From Brooklyn Heights (I may re-touch some of the photos I use, note this may have already occurred depending on when you read this)
- Noguchi Museum Sculpture Garden Magnolias (One of the more “as-advertised” articles in this set)
- Breaking My Hario v60 Coffee Glass (My replacement “glass” is working well so far)
- “The Boy I Like?” (Visual Novel Review) (The protagonist liked the boy more than I liked the novel, but it was still an interesting one to review)
- On Charging for Google Translate Translations (My opinion is probably about what you would expect)
- The Dangers in My Heart S2 Anime Review (The second season was a significant improvement over the first, which I reviewed in late 2023)
- Cherry Blossom Car and Petals in Brooklyn (A fitting article leading into my early May break)
- Telling Southwest I’m On Vacation (I followed this up for my return)
- Lawn Chairs Are Bigger In Texas (At least three of them are)
- Breaking Rules in GBC Pokémon TCG Tutorial (Think of this as a libertarian let’s play of a classic Game Boy Color game)
- 999: The Dialogue (999 articles at The New Leaf Journal)
- Turning My Pill Bug Video Clip Into GIF (1,000 articles at The New Leaf Journal done like a gif)
- Additional Thoughts on A Sign of Affection (I previously reviewed the anime in March)
- The McLaughlin Park World War I Memorial (My Memorial Day article project)
- New BLOB DYLAN in Bushwick (I also created a BLOB DYLAN collection hub)
- Dove on Sculpture at Noguchi Museum (This is one of my better photo posts if I do say so myself)
Postings in Other Places
I did not publish much on The Emu Café Social, but I look forward to changing that this summer. We did have a few fun posts, however.
- BokuYaba to Initial D (I needed a pallete cleanser after the excellent saccharine ending of the second season of The Dangers in My Heart)
- Sega Nomad Memories (Many batteries needed)
- …Wonders Whether URLs Should Be Sentences (As advertised…)
- Koko Analytics and Relevanssi (While I am not implementing this cool WordPress trick here, I thought it was worth sharing)
- Microsoft and Valve (Just because Microsoft lifted our Bing ban 10 months ago does not mean I will stop the Microsoft jokes)
I published six newsletters in April and May. There were two missed newsletters in the first half of May.
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXI 〜 Delivered by pigeon
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXII 〜 Sunny newsletter
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXIII 〜 The newsletter you like
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXIV 〜 NL-J Birth-day
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXV 〜 Return from Texas
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXXVI 〜 But NLJ M
Note that all of our newsletters have plenty of original content, including links from outside our projects. The last new newsletters on the list have some important news and notes about site issues (leading to improvements) in late May.
Most-Turned Leaves of April and May
I use a local privacy-friendly visit counting solution called Koko Analytics to keep track of how many people visit different New Leaf Journal articles. Below, I present our most-visited articles in April 2023 along with our most-visited articles for the three-month period beginning with February and concluding with April.
April 2024
May 2024
I now present the most-turned leaves of May 2024 and of the three month period beginning with March and concluding with May 2024. Note that I will not provide article links in cases where the article appeared in the above April ranking.
| May Rank | Article (Author. Published) | Mar-May Rank | 3-Mo Change |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search N.A. Ferrell. October 18, 2022 | 2 | +1 |
| 2 | Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2 N.A. Ferrell. November 5, 2023. | 14 | NEW |
| 3 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013) N.A. Ferrell. July 5, 2021. | 4 | +2 |
| 4 | Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) N.A. Ferrell. July 28, 2021. | 6 | +6 |
| 5 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei N.A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021. | 5 | +3 |
| 6 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) N.A. Ferrell. November 28, 2021. | 3 | +1 |
| 7 | Yuki’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection N.A. Ferrell. February 2, 2024. | 1 | +0 |
| 8 | Itsuomi’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection N.A. Ferrell. February 5, 2024. | 7 | -5 |
| 9 | A Sign of Affection Ep 7 Hair Color Notes N.A. Ferrell. February 20, 2024. | 17 | NEW |
| 10 | The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis N.A. Ferrell. January 18, 2022. | 8 | -3 |
| 11 | A Sign of Affection – Anime Review N.A. Ferrell. March 28, 2024. | X | X |
| 12 | How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name N.A. Ferrell. March 11, 2021. | 11 | +2 |
| 13 | Installing GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel 6a N.A. Ferrell. May 15, 2023. | 9 | +0 |
| 14 | Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow N.A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023. | X | X |
| 15 | Review of /e/ – An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones N.A. Ferrell. November 21, 2021. | X | X |
| 16 | The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten – Anime Review N.A. Ferrell. March 30, 2023. | 19 | +1 |
| 17 | The Last Nintendo Wii Games N.A. Ferrell. August 1, 2023. | 12 | -1 |
| 18 | Height Differences in Anime Romances N.A. Ferrell. March 22, 2023. | 16 | -1 |
| 19 | Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace N.A. Ferrell. November 15, 2023. | 22 | +2 |
| 20 | Reviewing “Rashomon and Other Stories” N.A. Ferrell. March 6, 2021. | X | X |
| 21 | Ghostwriter Markdown Editor Review N.A. Ferrell. October 6, 2021. | 18 | -1 |
| 22 | Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage N.A. Ferrell. February 3, 2023. | 23 | -4 |
| 23 | Broken Optical Audio Cable Door “Fix” N.A. Ferrell. September 16, 2023. | 13 | -3 |
| 24 | The Nice Boat: A Look Back at the School Days Anime N.A. Ferrell. May 6, 2021. | X | X |
| X | Heights in “The Dangers in My Heart” Anime N.A. Ferrell. April 3, 2023. | 10 | -3 |
| X | The Dangers in My Heart S1 Anime Review N.A. Ferrell. December 28, 2023 | 15 | -1 |
| X | Reviewing FrogFind: A Search Engine For Vintage Computers N.A. Ferrell. July 24, 2022. | 20 | NEW |
| X | Hair Color in The Apothecary Diaries Anime N.A. Ferrell. November 15, 2023. | 21 | -3 |
| X | The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum N.A. Ferrell. November 30, 2021. | 24 | -1 |
Analysis
Both April and May (especially May) were soft months by recent standards thanks to a decline in both Google and other search engine traffic from our January-February highs. But we had some fun ranking notes and milestones despite the overall decrease in traffic.
- In April, my article on Yuki’s hair color in A Sign of Affection became the first article to lead the monthly ranking for consecutive months since my tsuki ga kirei article, which happened to be the April runner-up, accomplished the feat in August and September of 2023. That also marked three consecutive wins for an article on hair color in A Sign of Affection combined with Itsuomi’s victory in February.
- While my top A Sign of Affection posts dropped in May, we saw four articles on the anime rank among our top-11, which is a feat I doubt we will see replicated in future months.
- As of May 2024, the only article to top a yearly-ranking in our 3-month top 24 is my history of tsuki ga kirei, which finished second in 2021 and 2022 before winning the yearly crown in 2023.
While I hope to see search traffic pick up again as we go forward, I am encouraged to see many new articles breaking into the monthly ranking in April and May, or not so new in the case of my 2021 book review of a collection of Akutagawa short stories.
Site News
I have begun personally curating all of the related posts that appear beneath our content and I will publish an article about the process in the near future. For the time being, this means two things:
- Our related posts will be much higher quality; and
- Because I am manually selecting all of the related posts, many posts will not have related posts for the time being.
I made a point of ensuring that our most popular posts are all covered and am gradually branching out from there.