February has come to a close and with that it is time for our regular month-in-review. You may notice a change with the timing this month. With the exception of October 2020 and October 2023 (for different reasons), I published all of my month-in-review posts going back to August 2020 on the last day of the month being reviewed. That has been tricky since I started including most-visited article rankings for the month since it all but forces me to write the review pieces in the evening of the last day of the month. Thus, going forward, I have decided to start publishing my month-in-review articles on one of the first two days of the month following the month being reviewed. Thus, we begin here on March 1, 2024, by reviewing the month that was at The New Leaf Journal in February.
New February Leaves
I published 15 new articles at The New Leaf Journal in February. I list below from first to last. I have designated five of the 19 articles as my personal “editor’s choice” picks, but I humbly recommend taking a look at all of them.
- Organizing RSS and ATOM Feed Sources (Feb. 1): A tour through different approaches to organizing a collection of RSS/ATOM feeds. [Editor’s Choice]
- Yuki’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection (Feb. 2): Examining the indirect-but-decisive evidence that an anime girl with strawberry hair is using dye and actually has dark brown hair. [Editor’s Choice]
- Comparing my al|together VN rank to VNDB (Feb. 3): I published my ranking of the 31 al|together visual novels back in January (see intro and directory). Here, I compared my ranking to the consensus ratings on Visual Novel Database.
- Itsuomi’s Hair Color in a Sign of Affection (Feb. 5): Having established that one of the two main characters in A Sign of Affection dyes her hair, I was unsurprised to find decisive evidence that her silver-haired love interest does not have naturally-occurring silver hair.
- Free H2O Seen in Brooklyn (Feb. 7): A short photo post and story that I had probably intended to publish a long time ago.
- Outine Guide to Persona 3 FES The Answer (Feb. 8): I ignored the release of the fourth version of Persona 3 in January 2024 to offer my old guide to the epilogue chapter of the second version of Persona 3, which was released in the United States in 2008.
- Sources On Ai Ai Gasa (Love Umbrella) (Feb. 13): I collected English sources on the meaning of the Japanese term ai ai gasa (literally pertaining to sharing an umbrella) for a fun and seasonal research article. [Editor’s Choice]
- EDDA Café – Visual Novel Review (Feb. 14): My review of an original freeware English language visual novel by an Indonesian circle that has a definite Valentine’s Day theme.
- Persona 3 FES Reaper Strategy (Infinity) (Feb. 17): My first look back at Persona 3 FES inspired me to write a second “guide” of sorts on the original strategy I put together to tackle a difficult optional boss (it may also work in the new Persona 3 Reload).
- Presidents Who Went By Middle Names (Feb. 19): I celebrated President’s Day with a study of the four U.S. Presidents who used their middle names as de facto first names. [Editor’s Choice]
- A Sign of Affection Ep 7 Hair Color Notes (Feb. 20): The A Sign of Affection anime is the 2D people hair color gift that keeps on giving (it also has more to give).
- WordPress.com One-Page Feed Aggregator Site (Feb. 22): You can also see the site here.
- Tomozaki Anime and Big Tech Social Media (Feb 23): I work to make sure that anime does not negatively affect its audience by questioning the use of an Instagram knockoff in the second season of Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki-kun.
- Introducing Pokémon Red Novel Project (Feb. 27): You can expect to see the novel actually begin this month.
- True Remembrance (Insani) – Visual Novel Review (Feb. 29): I wanted to do something special for February 29 and settled on a review of an excellent visual novel that I have been planning to write about since December 2020. [Editor’s Choice]
I also published about the same number of new posts on our sister site, The Emu Café Social. I will not list them all here (maybe ECS needs its own month-in-review going forward…), but I will point you to some of the highlights.
- Roman Origins of XFCE (I discover the Roman origins of the XFCE mouse mascot (note this is a joke))
- Avoiding Feed Reader Overrun (This complements my New Leaf Journal article on organizing feeds)
- An Email to “Info” (I only “respect” creative spam email)
- Brooklyn Bridge Clear of Vendors (An anecdote from a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge with a photo)
- What’s an Anime You Fell Asleep To? (I answered instead with an anime that could knock me out)
- Apple Hat Take on Sudo for Windows (I liked my joke at Apple’s expense)
- Microsoft Publisher Sunset Nostalgia (Come to think of it, I should expand this anecdote into a New Leaf Journal article)
- Fixing Computer With Punch (The “fix” still works)
- 2024 Winter Anime Mid-Season Impressions (Consider this a very early anime of the year preview)
Finally, I mailed four new editions of The Newsletter Leaf Journal in February. I recommend taking a look (if you have not done so already) because each newsletter comes with original content in addition to weekly recaps. You can sign up via email or simply use its RSS feed.
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXII 〜 No ad newsletter
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXIII 〜 Newsletter of affection
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXIV 〜 Under the umbrella
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CLXXV 〜 N. Leaf Journal
Finally, I introduced a new secondary newsletter called New Leaf Daily. This is technically just a Standard Notes blog powered by Listed, but I intend to use it for (somewhat) daily posts. I am still working out a format and my posting frequency has been less than daily, but feel free to give it a follow if you want to see how it developes.
Most-turned leaves of February 2024
I use an open source, privacy-friendly, and entirely local page counting solution called Koko Analytics to track page views and referrers here at The New Leaf Journal (see review). Each month, I list our 24 most-visited articles of the month and also of the three month period ending with the month in question. Below, you will find our most-visited articles of February 2024 and also of the period from December 2023-February 2024.
February was our best non-Hacker News aided month to date on a views-per-day basis, although February’s short length prevented it from being the best Hacker News-aided month in terms of absolute page views. It was a unique month in our history because of how much new articles contributed. Two of my three articles on hair color in A Sign of Affection took the first and third spots in the monthly ranking, marking a historic moment for my anime hair color project. A third February 2024 article, my piece on methods for organizing feeds, checked in with an impressive 14th-place finish. This month’s ranking did not feature too many major surprises outside of the A Sign of Affection duo dominating the top of the chart. While it was a good month for anime articles generally, two ranking stalwarts, my reviews of The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten and School Days, had rough months, with the former falling from posting consecutive top-fours to 18th and School Days falling out of the top-24 (albeit not by much) for the first time since 2022.
Final Thoughts
February 2024 was a fun month at The New Leaf Journal. I published a number of new articles that made an immediate splash and I hope to see a couple that did not (namely my studies of the meaning of ai ai gasa and presidential middle names) attract some new visitors in the future. I have also been putting work in behind the scenes, re-writing article captions and meta descriptions in order to improve our on-site search and related article features to help visitors find writing that interests them. I have some big projects in store for March and April, so I hope that you look forward to them and consider adding us to our organized RSS/ATOM feed collection.