Introducing Our Sixth Birthday Project Conclusion
I celebrated The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday on April 27, 2026, by starting a sixth birthday project wherein I would share on a schedule six articles featuring my blogging wisdom in the month of May. I have already published five “wisdom” articles, so today’s essay will bring our sixth birthday project to a close. Our concluding article’s theme is being the blogger or writer you want to be (or read).
Prefatory Note
I am sharing my blogging “wisdom” (such as it is) that I have derived from running The New Leaf Journal. As I have noted elsewhere, The New Leaf Journal is a non-commercial project. Thus, my wisdom that bloggers and writers should run websites that they would want to visit and to publish articles, blog posts, and media that they would want to read and view is necessarily grounded in the non-commercial context. If one depends on a blog, writing website, or media site to earn a living, mileage may vary with my perspective of wisdom on this subject. But with that caveat being granted, many (if not most) of the articles I read come from commercial websites and paid writers, and I would not be reading those articles if I did not think they were worth my time in one respect or another. In Re; The Indie Web Is Not Defined by Its Enemies, I opined:
There is good writing on Substack, Automattic-hosted WordPress sites, and for-profit publications with paid staff. There are also good posters on X (although that is not the norm given the format). Similarly, that something is published on a small website or decentralized, algorithm-free social media does not necessarily make it humane (as in by human beings for other human beings), much less interesting.
Thus, I think that my forthcoming thoughts may be pleasant or useful to anyone who is interested in publishing humane writing and media online in the hope that it will be pleasant or useful to someone, regardless of his or her revenue model or lack thereof. As Herbert Lui astutely warned in Don’t become a content machine, “if you hate what you’re doing, there’s only so much you can force yourself to do before your dislike for the process shows in your work.”
Writing About What You Are Interested in Writing (Or Reading) About
I developed a clear and distinct idea for this essay after reading a quote from blogger Renkon’s On Bubbles:
[T]he whole ‘why are people talking about X and not Y?’ argument is pretty moot when you’re running a subscriber-funded website that is neither beholden to SEO nor advertisers. Like, if you want to talk about other games besides the major releases, you can just do that, y’know. Be the games media you want to see in the world.
“Be the games media you want to see in the world.” In our case we are not limited to games media, but the point just as well applies more broadly. But while we are on the subject of games, I will borrow a game example from Joel Chrono’s Performative Blogging. He describes he tension he perceives between wanting “to be known” and “writ[ing] about whatever I feel like writing.”
A part of me wants to write about the next big thing that will get a lot of clicks, and that has stopped me on/in? my tracks from writing about what my brain would usually come up with.
He continued:
[W]ho wants to read a young adult rambling about a toy from the early 2000s and its low budget movies with PS2 quality graphics? Why would one care about the early beginnings of yet another hobby of mine when there’s a dozen I’ve written about already? How trendy can a blogpost about an old PSP game with terrible controls and lots of grinding really get? Tomodachi Life is the one somewhat trendy topic, but whatever.
I have written all of my blogging wisdom articles under the assumption that current and prospective bloggers who are interested in my wisdom are, at a minimum, not opposed to people reading their public musings. We can go a step further and venture that most, like Joel Chrono and yours truly, hope that people find their articles and become regular readers. But, to be sure, there are topics which have the tendency to generate greater interest and discussion and those that are only of interest to a small number of people who may never stumble upon that one post on their peculiar interest on someone’s independent blog. Renkon presents an ideal. Joel Chrono (who, to be sure, does regularly write about his interests) raises a challenging question. We may agree that it is both fitting and proper to write about the things we are interested in writing and reading about, but that agreement may not persuade everyone or ameliorate the sorts of doubts Joel Chrono raised. Can I put together a compelling practical case for being the blogger you yourself want to be or to read?
Jim Grey wrote in Blogging in the AI era, part 1: The accidental contract:
People like us who blog just write about things that interested us. Internet fame might be nice, but we’ve learned it’s elusive. We learn to be content that someone, someday, will find our work useful.
I agree in full but do so after adding “pleasant or” right before “useful.” Instead of reinventing the wheel, I will refer readers to my discourse on the “True Blogger” from the second entry in this series, Blogging and the Niche Question. But for those who want to continue with this essay before jumping to that one, I re-share a quote from Jeff Starr’s The Pros and Cons of Blogging:
[P]opularity is not synonymous with success. Blogs that are popular have managed to appeal to the mainstream mentality, but are far from successful on many other levels. Originality, sincerity, authenticity, and truthfulness are just a handful of the different measures of a blog’s success. You don’t have to be like everyone else — dare to be different.
I will add for purpose of the instant discussion that chasing fame through a blog is a fool’s errand. Fame may come to a small number of bloggers, but I will venture that the majority of famous bloggers are people who are famous for reasons not entirely grounded in their blog. In my opening entry to this series, Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online, I suggested ways in which someone can glean personal benefits from sharing their thoughts in the form of articles, essays, and blog posts online. Those benefits accrue to those who translate genuine curiosity and the end result of thinking about things carefully, not content chasing impressions and likes. In The Social Consumer, Alex at Denshi Site shared a starkly negative but nevertheless accurate take on a depressing internet phenomenon:
This brings me perfectly to the topic of The Social Consumer. Being one is a horrible existence, characterized with wasting eons in front of a computer screen, waiting for ‘replies’ rather than just moving on with your life.
We can adapt this take to blogging. Chasing popularity instead of seeking to produce something of value that may be pleasant or useful to people who happen upon it is approaching blogging and internet writing through the lens of social media. I offered a full critique of empty “creation” of “content” for an audience of algorithms in Creators and More and More Content.
Rejecting the pursuit of popularity or virality is not incompatible with having desire to find readers, but it is a critique of seeking improper ends. “Popularity” is not the first objective of the true blogger or writer who derives personal benefits from blogging, but instead it is something that may follow from writing well and a bit of good fortune.
In Blogging in the AI era, part 4: The decline of search and social discovery, Jim Grey made an interesting distinction between different kinds of visitors, or to be more precise, between visitors and something else:
Blogging has always had two kinds of readers. There are the visitors, people who arrive for a specific piece of information, get what they came for, and leave. And there are the readers, people who find something that resonates, come back, and eventually become part of the community a blog builds over time.
He continued:
The discovery systems that are weakening — social referrals, and increasingly search — were always better at delivering visitors than readers.
I agree that “discovery” systems are weakening, although the reasons for that are beyond the scope of this essay. Instead, let us focus on his distinction between “visitors” and “readers.” The majority of people who find a specific article or blog post through search or social media are unlikely to peruse the website beyond that particular blog post or article, much less bookmark the website or follow it via RSS/ATOM feed, email, or a something to the effect of a social media channel. But a subset of visitors who find something pleasant or useful on a certain website may go further and read other articles and blog posts or view other media on that website. A subset of those people may go further and become what Mr. Grey calls the “reader,” someone who regularly checks in to the website to see what is new. Mr. Grey goes on to note, in line with my attributing some part of “popularity” to good fortune, that the mechanisms which drive visitors—search engine traffic, social media platforms, and these day various AI implementations—may change dramatically from one moment to the next. What is a blogger, who has no control over those broader forces, to do? Mr. Grey suggested an interesting way of thinking about the issue:
Instead of asking how to survive AI disrupting discovery, maybe the better question is: what was actually building your readership all along, and are you paying enough attention to that?
In The Emu Café and Blog Hospitality, I shared a quote from Scott Nesbitt’s A Contrarian’s Guide to Blogging:
What you should be aiming for is a core of enthusiastic, engaged readers. I’d rather have 100 engaged readers than 1,000 casual ones. People who keep coming back because what I’ve written is helpful, is interesting, and speaks to them.
To the extent a blogger wants to achieve some sort of notoriety, a project with “a core of enthusiastic, engaged readers” is much more resilient than one that relies on transient visitors referred by forces which may, in turn, change their policies on a whim. As I discussed in Google Search and Independent Websites, what those forces give one day, they may take away the next–or so I learned first hand as I discussed in The story of our Bing blacklisting (fortunately long-since resolved).
How can one cultivate a “readership,” here being a “core audience,” that regularly reads articles and blog posts and/or views media on a given website or project? I begin with a strong take by Matthias Endler in Npw’s The Time To Start That Blog:
Everyone wants to read personal thoughts from real human beings, but no one writes them anymore. What we get instead is slop, and that’s hardly a good read. The moment I notice I’m reading autogenerated text, I care less.
While what “everyone” wants is unfortunately unduly optimistic, I agree that there is a real audience for “thoughts from real human beings.” I suggested how to cater to this audience and to expand the audience in Staying the Course in Writing in the LLM Moment:
The way to convince people that human writing is worth reading is to write well and in one’s own voice—a principle which applies to other forms of art.
While I suppose it is possible to write humanely (as in human thoughts for human readers) while chasing trends, someone is more likely to write articles that will be pleasant or useful to others if they are topics of interest to the writer and that the writer finds pleasant or useful. The writer’s interest, curiosity, perspective, and perhaps expertise, may show itself in the final product. I return to Jeff Starr’s The Pros and Cons of Blogging:
[A]s you learn to express yourself in a genuine, authentic manner, readers will respond, and you will find yourself with an audience that has tuned in to your uniqueness.
I also re-share a quote from Josh Blais’ Using the internet like it’s 1999 which I used in two prior “wisdom” posts:
Authenticity is in short supply and seems to be the only way forward, for so much of what we see is manufactured, tailored, and designed to show something that doesn’t exist … We can strive to glorify the Creator with creation, and that will always be more enjoyable than the sterile veil over what could be authentic.
This process bore fruit for Matthias Ender:
People are reading [my blog] and from time to time I get an email from someone who found one of my articles helpful.
Most of the articles I linked to were written in the context of what the “true blogger” may view as negative contemporary internet trends. One of my recent pet projects has been making The Positive Case for Good Tech without needing to define the good by contrast to the bad. While I think all of the articles I linked in this section made the positive case, I demonstrated in my positive case essay that we can find inspiration in what people wrote in the pre-social media days of the internet. Way back on September 7, 2000, Rebecca Blood wrote the following in weblogs: a history and perspective:
We are being pummeled by a deluge of data and unless we create time and spaces in which to reflect, we will be left with only our reactions. I strongly believe in the power of weblogs to transform both writers and readers from ‘audience’ to ‘public’ and from ‘consumer’ to ‘creator.’
A “weblog” which serves as a place for the writer to reflect on topics of interest is more likely to find a small-but-dedicated audience of readers who are interested in joining the author in reflecting. Rebecca Blood offered the following advice on March 22, 2023 in Ten Tips For A Better Weblog:
Write about what you love. A weblog is the place for strong opinions, whether about politics, music, social issues, gardening, or your profession. The more engaged you are with your subject, the more interesting your writing will be.
I do not think that a blog necessarily has to feature “strong opinions,” especially not in every article or post, but I agree in full with her position that “[t]he more engaged you are with your subject, the more interesting your writing will be” (at least assuming all things are equal other than the author’s subject-matter interest and expertise).
The foregoing principles also apply to web design. In the penultimate entry of this series, Choosing How to Build and Host a Blog, I quoted from blogger Adële’s All my clients wanted a carousel, now it’s an AI chatbot!, which covered the phenomenon of trend-chasing in web design. The post describes clients who ask for chatbots on their websites despite the fact that they personally find them annoying and useless. In the context of a blog or small writing/media website, it should go without saying that one should design his or her site in a way that would not offend his or her own web browsing sensibilities. But we can also think of the issue from the perspective of how someone approaches crafting and publishing media to a writing website.
If a blogger decides to fill his or her website with things he or she finds annoying — such as pop-upos, carousels, social media widgets, chatbots, and the like — all because he or she sees those things on “popular” websites, that person may be more apt to view his or her website as a home for posts that appeal to algorithms and the trends of the moment instead of a digital home for his or her own careful thoughts and insights about matters of interest.
My perspective in the second blogging wisdom essay, Blogging and the Niche Question, was informed by the fact that I am the opposite of a niche blogger, lest I am a niche unto myself. While some of my articles are about “popular” subjects, many others are less mainstream, including a significant number of articles about things I see and document on my walks in Brooklyn. I stay true to writing about what I want to write about.
Digging into my own archive, one example of my work that may inform the discussion at hand is my al|together visual novel series. As I explained in my April 11, 2021 The al|together and Insani Visual Novel Translations, I set out to play, think about, and review 31 English localizations of Japanese visual novels that were contributed to three translation festivals in 2005, 2006, and 2008. While the al|together project was of historic significance to bringing Japanese visual novels to the West, neither the project nor the visual novels which came from it were “mainstream” at the time of the festivals, much less more than a decade after the culmination of al|together 2008. As I explained in my project introduction, that was one of multiple reasons I was inspired to review them:
Through this project, I hope to introduce readers to a unique project from quite a few years ago and highlight some terrific visual novels that more people should read and enjoy.
I managed to play and write about all of the al|together novels by the end of January 2024, thus completing the main part of my project. Unsurprisingly, none of my al|together articles have been especially “popular,” although five of my reviews placed between positions 106 and 134 on our top-140 most-visited articles in 2025 list. I will note that the project was time-consuming. I had to learn how to deal with configuring language environments in WINE, interpreting MIDI on Linux, finding a lost Japanese copy of one of the novels, and actually reading and putting together 29 full reviews (there is nothing I love more than writing alt text for visual novel screenshots). Many articles that achieved greater “popularity” than my al|together reviews required much less time and effort on my part. But with that being said, I happily report that I have no regrets about the al|together project. I used the project as an “excuse” to play novels that I had been interested in tackling for years but had yet to get around to (note I had read a few of them 8-10 years before starting The New Leaf Journal). Through the project, I learned a good amount about visual novels and running things on Linux, which opened the door to new projects. I was also happy to learn that it led to some small tangible benefits. My work on finding Manatsu no Kagerou for my own review led to the visual novel, which had largely been unplayable for many years, being made available again, as I discussed in New Manatsu no Kagerou Download Option. A visual novel developer who goes by Zalor recently wrote about discovering al|together through my reviews and being inspired by one of the visual novels to make his own, as he discusses in Al|together and Sovl: Finding Inspiration In Forgotten Freeware VNs. These are two of a few examples of my small al|together project finding its way to the screens of interested readers who found something valuable in it. That would not have happened had I decided to not write about al|together because the project and the novels that came out of it are neither popular nor well-known.
Of course, sometimes a niche project can achieve surprising success. Also beginning in 2021, I launched a series of articles on hair color in Japanese anime, games, and manga/novels. I had assumed that no one would share my interest in the intense study of hair color in anime. By early 2024, my expectations were subverted to such a degree that I published a whole article on the matter in History of My Anime Hair Color Project. Many of my anime hair color articles were “popular” (by my standards) in 2024 and 2025 and that trend continues into 2026. One of my favorite discoveries was when I found that I had made a list of recommended sites almost solely for the hair color articles.
I could discuss many other examples of articles I wrote about “non-popular topics,” but those two examples should suffice for our instant purposes. I will conclude my main argument by looking at the issues from the perspective of a reader instead of a writer, which seems like a fitting way to bring this project to a close. It should be more or less axiomatic that I am inclined to be a “reader” of writers and websites that cover topics I am already interested in, including the sorts of non-“popular” targets that prompted this essay. But there are also instances when I have enjoyed reading about topics that a different writer or blogger is interested in but I am not. These cases occur when I enjoy how the blogger or writer in question writes and shares his or her passion about something he or she finds interesting. While I may not adopt the interest myself, one can learn interesting things or come to think about something in a different way from reading the interested writings of someone. To offer a few of examples, I read Cabbage Sorter’s articles (see blog) about a Chinese gatcha dress up game that I would not touch with a 12-foot poll, because I find her thoughts on playing and the in-game aesthetics entertaining. I shared Takafumi’s thoughts on playing Venus Vacation Prism: Dead or Alive Xtreme in my final Newsletter of 2025. While I am not planning to take up the game myself, his discourse on in-game photography and making appealing characters made me think. In a totally different category, I recently came across Jennifer Mills’ Jennifer Mills News, wherein Jennifer Mills produces a weekly one-page newspaper about the life and times in Brooklyn of Jennifer Mills. I do not know Ms. Mills, but I found her weekly newspaper, which has apparently been around for a while, amusing, so I added it to my feed collection. Because of my tendency to link to articles around the web, a perusal of my archive will reveal that I have gained interests over time by reading articles and sharing my thoughts about them on The New Leaf Journal.
Simply writing about one’s interests does not, of course, complete the circuit. One can become complacent in writing about topics of interest because writing is thinking, and thinking about something interesting can be interesting in its own way. Moreover, as Joshua Blais warned in Become Unconsumerist, one should refrain from “identify[ing] with the things we have rather than becom[ing] the person we want to be.” Reading about someone’s interests will most likely be interesting for others when the person thinks clearly about her interests instead of identifying with them and conveys the product of that clear thinking in his or her own voice. But so long as the blogger or writer is willing to approach subjects of interest from the perspective of the “true blogger” I described in Blogging and the Niche Question, he or she should not be inhibited by the fear that the project may not be popular with algorithims or chatbots.
Birthday Conclusion
With my case that the true blogger should be the blogger he or she wants to be or to read, I bring The New Leaf Journal’s month-long birthday party to a close. As we move into our seventh year, regular readers can trust that I will continue to be the internet writer I want to be and read (if you are new here, I humbly invite you to become a regular in this cozy establishment). In the interim, I will start thinking about how we can top our sixth birthday celebration with something even more exciting in April-May 2027.
