Another month is in the books, and with that, it is time for our month-end review. For the first time since March, I am reviewing a single month instead of two months in one. It is a good thing too – because August turned out to be busy. August 2022 remains our all-time record month thanks to my review of /e/ OS having made it to the top three of Hacker News’s page 1. August 2024 was significant for a different reason – I mostly completed a stylistic overhaul of The New Leaf Journal in the final few days of the month. Tweaks have continued into September and you may expect a few more changes here or there, but what you see now is what you should expect to get for the foreseeable future.
Fortunately, I did not forget about publishing articles – for site style changes are of little use if there is nothing new for you to read. Below, I discuss those articles, my changes to the site, and our most-visited posts of August 2024.
New Articles
I published 20 new articles in August 2024 – the clear winner for busiest month of 2024. I will set aside my June-July review and organize the new articles into topical categories instead of just listing them in order of their publication.
Video Games
I published two new articles on Midsummer Haze, a freeware visual novel I reviewed last year as part of a bigger project. First, I wrote about a new way to download the novel in which the person responsible credited the work I did in finding a copy of the original Japanese game (the Japanese game is required to play the English game). Secondly, I remembered that the Japanese author noted in his afterword that he was writing the afterword during the 2004 Athens Olympics. Since I had cause to write about the novel again during the 2024 Olympics, another article was in order. Those who remember the anguish I went through in my original review (having to re-do the same thing 43 times) will learn about my more pleasant experience this time around.
While my new play-through of Midsummer Haze went surprisingly well, the same cannot be said about my efforts to catch a Caterpie in Viridian Forest in Pokémon Red – a struggle I had much to say about. I was using a Nintendo Switch Online SNES controller when I spent more than an hour searching for Caterpie. I discussed using that controller back in July. In August, I switched from the SNES controller for Red to an original NES model 2 controller with a USB adapter, which I covered in a full article. I wrote separately about configuring the NES 2 controller for use in RetroArch on Linux.
Presidents and Presidential Elections
On August 7, I published my study of the biggest age gaps on major party U.S. presidential election tickets, inspired by the nearly four-decade age difference between the 2024 Republican presidential and vice presidential nominees, Donald Trump and J.D. Vance. Researching that article inspired me to publish a study on the success rate of the older presidential candidate in elections. That second article inspired yet another study on August 20 wherein I looked at cases in which we had an incumbent president running in at least two consecutive presidential elections.
On August 25, a sighting of the Governor Alfred E. Smith boat docked in Brooklyn Bridge Park (several photos included) prompted me to write about Smith’s first of three unsuccessful attempts to win the presidency at the 1924 Democratic National Convention.
Anime and Manga
On August 12, I covered aesthetics and hair color in an ongoing (as of this writing) anime series, Days with My Stepsister.
In late August, I booted up my Kindle for the first time in a while and saw a lockscreen ad for the Kindle edition of the A Sign of Affection manga. Several of our most-visited articles of 2024 are about the A Sign of Affection anime. In a few of those articles I referenced that I had read some of the manga. Here, I tell the story of how I came to read some of the early manga chapters when they were first being released in English. What does that have to do with my colon? Read on to find out.
Miscellaneous
Three of my August articles lack peers this month.
On August 9, I speciously rescinded my take that X is conducive to bad content based on a war of X words between CEO Elon Musk and Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (I suppose that back-and-forth was subsequently overshadowed by Brazil vs X).
On August 13, I published my personal favorite of our August articles – a new Justin and Justina dialogue centered on the different ways that one may interpret the phrase the bird is free – specifically differences between how someone who wants a bird and someone who is a bird.
On August 27, I tested whether I could make six or fewer NBA All Star teammate connections from LeBron James to one of the 24 players who saw the floor in the inaugural 1951 NBA All Star Game.
Off-Site Publications
I will set aside the rest of my August 2024 New Leaf Journal articles for the moment (the reason will become clear in the next section) and cover some of my writing on other fora.
I published regularly on our sister short-form publishing site, The Emu Café Social. You can see all of our August posts here. I will not cover all of them here, and I will discuss a few that may serve as future article reviews later in this post, but I will share a few highlights. In Beating the Game Informer Shutdown I noted that I had saved a couple of Game Informer articles that I plan to use for a future New Leaf Journal well before the magazine shut down and nuked its entire archive. In My Favorite Sports Anime, I revealed my favorite sports anime in a way that people who also watched it will understand. I offered my take on open source Android feed readers on August 14. I overheard not one but two things on the street. In my most-visited ECS post of the month, I offered some specious and serious thoughts on desktop Linux’s increasing market share.
I did not fail to mail a Saturday newsletter this month after a few missed weeks from May-July. You can see all of our issues below. As always, I note that the newsletters have plenty of original content including links from around the web, so there is something there to enjoy even if you have had your fill of New Leaf Journal articles (as if that is possible).
- Issue 193: OatMilk Newsletter
- Issue 194: Newsletter ticket
- Issue 195: Days with my newsletter
- Issue 196: Incumbent inbox
- Issue 197: What re-design?
Speaking of re-designs…
Changes to The New Leaf Journal
The New Leaf Journal looks very different now than it did at the beginning of August. Before I explain what I did, let us discuss some articles I wrote during August that inspired different parts of the site’s transformation.
On August 11, I wrote about switching to manually curating all of our related posts (still an ongoing project) in order to help new readers find articles that may be of interest based on whatever they happened to stumble upon. Manually curating related posts is work. Maybe it inspired me to do some other work.
My inspiration for changing the look of The New Leaf Journal began with a search experiment. On August 16, I tested to see how various external search engines handled a domain-specific search of NLJ. I also tested our internal search and was not satisfied with the results. This prompted me to test enabling boolean search functionality, which I wrote about just three days later. While I will venture that few people other than me will take advantage of our boolean search, I can confirm that it is a vast improvement over the default natural language search if you have enough of an idea of what you are looking for to refine your queries.
Let us pocket the search for a moment and look at my August 21 article wherein I examined whether it is better to use an RSS/ATOM/JSON feed to read full text articles in a feed reader’s reader view or to navigate to the original source. I argued that it depends on the site in question. In that article, I had to concede that, for the most part, there was little value added in reading The New Leaf Journal outside of reader mode since our site was not especially pretty. This made me sad to write.
Having considered the matter, I decided to see what I could do to make The New Leaf Journal pretty enough that some of our feed subscribers may be inclined to choose to visit directly instead of always using reader mode in a feed reader. First, I dealt with our search bar. I previously had one search bar in our header and one in our footer. Both of these search bars were ugly and somewhat misaligned. I looked into how to override the default CSS styling for the search bar, got rid of both search bars that we had, and inserted our new, more stylish search bar located between the header and the content. I also ensured that it would be sized slightly differently on mobile displays than on desktop and tablet. What good would my search changes have done had the search bar not been improved?
Once I changed the search bar, I figured I should change some other things too. It would be easier to ask what I didn’t change about the appearance of The New Leaf Journal than what I did change, but we can work through a long list.
- I changed just about every color on the site except for the background colors in the header bar and on regular headers. The most important changes were the main background (from an unappealing gray to a much warmer beige) and the articles proper (a subtle off-white). I then adjusted other elements such as borders and special blocks in articles to go with the new main color scheme. The main font color is slightly different but I doubt most readers will notice. The change in link color however is more noticeable (but still blue), and I also changed the link hover color to an orange which sharply contrasts with our new blue.
- My new search bar was slightly rounded. I decided that I liked rounding. Our previous theme was very square. As you will see, almost everything save for a few in-article blocks is now a rounded rectangle. I think this makes the site look warmer and more modern while still maintaining the overall feel.
- I changed all of our system font stacks – although we are still using system fonts, meaning that the fonts you see depend on what is installed on your device. The most notable changes are that the title is always serif now (I figured out how to target it in different places), and our article titles are also now serif while the rest of the headers remain sans-serif. I figured out how to fix a text alignment issue I was having with tables and, in the process, made the font in tables monospaced.
- I never liked the author box that comes with our theme (see my complaint about it all the way back in 2020) and for that reason I had not been using it. One of my IndieWeb plugins comes with its own quasi-author box. I had not been using it because it looked awful on my theme by default (it works great on the ECS theme albeit that one was designed with IndieWeb in mind). I figured out how to style it and now we have very sleek author boxes with many more profile links.
I made another tweak earlier in the month. I installed a local link shortening plugin called Hum, which gives us aesthetic short-links with no third-party dependencies for sharing on social media. This inspired my last article of August on using our now-improved plain-text Twtxt feeds to find recent articles. In that post, I made a reference to the improved aesthetics of The New Leaf Journal.
This list of changes is non-exhaustive and I may have some more minor adjustments in store. I will note that I also re-activated our Guestbook, although that is a September change for our next month-end review (do go see what I did with the Guestbook comment form, however). I have also been working on re-designing The Emu Café Social, which perhaps surprisingly has been more challenging since there are a few extra moving parts there that are not issues on The New Leaf Journal. While I did not design it with dark mode in mind, I found that for me at least – the site looks solid in dark mode on my GrapheneOS (Android-based) Google Pixel 6a’s Chromium-based Vanadium browser. However, I do think this is one site which generally looks better in non-dark mode.
A bonus change
I also added Dublin Core metadata to all of our posts. This will not matter to the vast majority of readers, but if you happen to add one of our articles to Zotero or a similar reference manager that looks for Dublin Core, you should be happy with what you get.
Most-visited leaves of August 2024
I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to count page views (Koko Analytics works entirely locally – you can read my 2021 review, although it has changed a bit while still maintaining the same basic functionality). Each month, I list our most-visited articles according to Koko Analytics. Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of August 2024 and of the three month period from June 1 through August 31.
August and June-August Top 24s
We saw a spike in visitors in the second half of August, which happened to coincide with a major Google algorithm change. After having had several months of declining visits beginning with April, our late August numbers were close to our very strong stretch from November 2023-February 2024, although taken with the beginning of the month, we came up well short of those numbers for the month as a whole.
The big winner of August was my Norton Safe Search review, which ended the two-month reign of my article on having had good foresight to review The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten last year. Those two articles have now combined to lead the previous four monthly rankings.
We had a fun third place in my 2021 article on hair color in Kimi ni Todoke – which benefited from that anime, which had concluded in 2011, unexpectedly receiving a third season which aired in full on August 1, 2024 (note: I had no idea that a third season would happen when I wrote my article in 2021). You should expect more Kimi ni Todoke writing in the near future.
There were not too many surprises in the top-half of our top-24, although my article on a hacky broken optical audio cable fix achieved its highest placement (5th), albeit not its best month in terms of total visits. One notable was my article on my Logitech K310 keyboard, which is no longer my primary keyboard (I am typing this draft on a Filco Majestitouch v3), not only making its first month-end top 24 but doing so in 11th place.
In the second half of our top-24, we have my visual novel review of Kaori After Story in 14th, which is the best finish for any of my visual novel reviews since my 2021 review of LoveChoice placed 12th in September of that year. However, Kaori After Story had significantly more visits in August 2024 than did the LoveChoice review in September 2021, so it sets our new mark for best single-month visual novel review performance in absolute terms. [Our last monthly ranking debut comes at 21st, with my anecdote on remembering a unique version of a 1999 Pokémon urban legend. That was not an article I expected to see make a monthly top 24 – especially more than two years after I first published it – but it was a fun article that I had been thinking about writing before The New Leaf Journal existed, so I am glad to see it receiving some attention.
Looking Ahead and Taking Leaf
Given how much I accomplished in August, you may be surprised to learn that I was disappointed to have not had time to publish a few articles that I had prioritized. Unfortunately, I was slammed with work in the last week and change of August, meaning that I had to put a few projects on hold (most of my late August articles had existed in draft form before I added my finishing touches). I will reveal those three articles here:
- Analysis of the story in May Sky (visual novel);
- Anime review of Living for the Day After Tomorrow (2006 series); and
- Review of an original English language visual novel called The Dandelion Girl.
I plan to get all three of these published in September, most likely in the order I listed above. The first two are summer-themed articles (that may sound off for May Sky, but the reason will be clear when you read it), but most of September is still technically summer – so I consider it still fair game.
I also have a decent number of articles that exist in draft form, so I will work through those and publish some of them in September.
