August 2023 is just about in the books. That means it is time to add another month-in-review to The New Leaf Journal’s books. We published our very first month-in-review in August 2020, and we have kept the tradition going every month since. August 2023 was far less eventful than August 2022, which featured record-breaking (by our standards) page views thanks to Hacker News. But despite the lack of history and our comparatively small publishing output, we do have quite a bit of news to report from August along with our new articles.

New articles from August 2022

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This is our 11th and final regular article for August. See the first 10 below.

Leaflet Posts

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I published 11 short Leaflet posts in August.

Leaf Bud Posts

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I published 7 short Leaf Bud posts in August.

Newsletters

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I mailed four newsletters in August 2023. Below, I will link to our New Leaf Journal syndicated versions of the newsletters. You can sign up to receive the Saturday newsletter in your inbox (or add its RSS feed) when it is first released.

Most-visited articles of August 2023

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I use a privacy-friendly local analytics solution called Koko Analytics (see review) to gain an idea of how many hits our articles receive. I use these statistics for our yearly and monthly reviews and for our weekly rankings (weekly rankings appear in the newsletter). Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of August 2023 along with our 24 most-visited articles of the three-month period from June to August 2023.

July RankArticleByPubJune-July Rank
1The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga KireiNAF3.14.212
2The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and AnalysisNAF1.18.223
3Abraham Lincoln’s 1851 Letters on Work to John D. JohnstonNAF11.4.218
4Height differences in anime romancesNAF3.22.231
5Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem EngageNAF2.3.235
6An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe SearchNAF10.18.229
7Peekier Search Engine ReviewNAF2.26.226
8The Nice Boat 〜 A Look Back at the School Days AnimeNAF5.6.217
9Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021)NAF11.28.2111
10Using Web Archives To Get Around CAPTCHAsNAF8.12.2217
11Review of /e/ – An Android Alternative For Mobile PhonesNAF11.21.2113
12Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013)NAF7.5.2110
13Installing GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel 6aNAF3.15.2322
14Heights in “The Dangers in My Heart” AnimeNAF4.2.234
15The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten – Anime ReviewNAF3.30.2316
16The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet OpossumNAF11.30.2121
17How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its NameNAF3.11.2114
18Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam)NAF11.15.2018
19The Last Stand of Constantine XINAF5.30.2015
20Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGoNAF8.8.21
21Review of the Teracube 2e SmartphoneNAF11.19.21
22An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram AlternativeNAF11.13.20
23Peekier redirects to Kagi SearchNAF5.2.2324
24Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi)NAF7.28.2120
The Enigmatic Life and Death of Emperor OthoNAF4.16.2112
Brooklyn Banana Bench PhotoNAF4.2.2119
Futaba Igarashi’s Hair Is Naturally Green?NAF11.23.2123

This month featured the closest race for the top spot in the monthly ranking. My articles on the Pokémon special split in generation 2 and Abraham Lincoln’s 1851 letter to his half-brother led the August ranking for the first 30 days of the month. Unfortunately for both of those articles, August is one of those months with 31 days instead of 30. My tsuki ga kirei article made a late charge and took the lead in the monthly ranking for the first time on August 31. Since that is the key date here, my tsuki ga kirei article notched its third monthly win of the first eight months of 2023 after leading the list in January and June. Notably, this is the first time my tsuki ga kirei article has led the August ranking after finishing fourth in 2021 and third in 2022.

August 2023 featured few surprises as reflected by the fact that 21 of the top 24 articles also featured in the top 24 of our three-month ranking. I was happy to see my article on circumventing Cloudflare by using the Wayback Machine posted its best-ever month with a 10th place finish. That article has some useful tips, so I hope that people keep finding it.

Site News and Notes

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Bing removed its block on The New Leaf Journal in late August (I started seeing referrals on about August 18) and formally confirmed that we are back in the Bing index. I doubt that we will ever receive an explanation for our arbitrary de-indexing in January or why we were blocked from Bing for eight months, but it is good to be back in the second biggest English-language search index. DuckDuckGo quickly returned to our former status as our second most common search referrer, but our early Koko Analytics stats suggest that it will take a few months to regain the status we had in Bing and Bing-dependent search tools that we had in late 2022.

I made three notable changes to The New Leaf Journal proper, all of which were documented in Leaflets. Firstly, I added a Twtxt feed. This will not be important to the vast majority of users, but I encourage any Twtxt users to try our new feed. Secondly, I changed our sitemap (big news if you are a robot, but it is human-readable). Finally, I changed our system font stack so that our article bodies use a serif stack while our headers continue to use a sans serif stack. I may fiddle with it in the future, but I like the current look.

Looking Ahead

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August was light on new articles, but I look forward to stepping up our publishing pace in September (albeit maybe not quite as much as September 2020). This is both because I have ideas piling up on the back-burner and to build some momentum going into the last third of 2023. I hope you join us for all the new articles in September, perhaps by following our feed collection.