The first month of 2025 is in the books. The end of the month means that it is time for our regularly-scheduled month-in-review post, a tradition which dates back to August 2020. January topped December 2024 as the busiest month in terms of visitor traffic in New Leaf Journal history that did not involve one of our articles appearing on page 1 of Hacker News, which in turn leaves it as our fifth busiest month to date. Below, I recap our January articles and our most-visited posts of the month.
New Leaves from January 2025
I published many new posts on The New Leaf Journal and its sister-publications.
New Leaf Journal Articles
I published 13 new New Leaf Journal articles in January.
The first article of the new year was my December 2024 at The New Leaf Journal review, which I recommend reading if you are not fully caught up on the end of 2024 on our site. I needed to get that article out the door so I could publish my full 2024 recap, The 81 Most-Visited Articles of 2024, wherein I listed our 81 most-visited posts of the now-complete 2024 along with notes and commentary.
January 2025 saw the publication of two sports articles. First, I studied an interesting College Football Playoff issue in The Army-Navy Game and the College Football Playoffs. Next, continuing in a series of NBA statistics posts, I defended the honor of one of the teams of my youth in 2002-03 Celtics and Relative Three Point Stats.
Three new articles hit on tech issues. in AI AI Meta – A Dialogue of Sorts, I turned to our resident fictional dialogue duo, Justin and Justina, to tackle the issue of Meta’s AI-generated Facebook and Instagram profiles. In Enabling Charging Optimization on GrapheneOS, I discussed a nice feature addition to the GrapheneOS mobile operating system (GrapheneOS is an Android fork available for some Google Pixel devises). Seeing my 2020 early look at Pixelfed do well in January (more on that later) inspired me to write January 2025 Look at Pixelfed Social, in which I articulate my up-to-date views on the open source decentralized take on Instagram.
January was a good month for photo posts. Having previously written about a Cybertruck-in-Brooklyn Bridge Park sighting in December, I covered a second Park Cybertruck in Eddy’s Branded Cybertruck at Brooklyn Bridge Park. I wrote consecutive posts on the issue of past-their-prime pumpkins in Putting Pumpkins Out to Pasture and Brave Pumpkin in a Hat, both of which I added to a new Pumpkin Posts collection. Finally, I dug into my photo archive to publish Free ‘Hardly Used’ Toilet Seen in Brooklyn (actually as advertised).
Shortly after the inauguration of President Donald Trump 47, I revisited the November 2024 and 2004 elections in Trump 2024 vs Bush 2004: State-by-State.
Finally, I ended the month with my personal 2024 anime ranking in The Best TV Anime of 2024. I had planned to publish its companion anime category award article in January, but the second post went live just after midnight on February 1, so I will reserve it for our February review on technicality grounds.
Emu Café Social Posts
I had a busy first-half of January 2025 on our short-form publishing sister site, The Emu Café Social.
I decided to start a series of things I learned posts – inspired by an article I wrote on The New Leaf Journal in late December. In January I learned about: The Machida Squirrel Garden; Sports Gambling in Q3 2024; Determining Saw-whet Owl Age; In-Season College Football Number Changes; Removing WordPress Comments Feed From Head; TP-Link Security Issues; Funding the Fact-Checking Industry; There Are More TikToks (“Lemon”); Car Software and Recalls; Cats on Rikers Island; SlamBall May Still Exist; New Polar Icebreaker Joins USCG Fleet; In-Flight Gambling; Check uBlock Origin Settings on Miniflux; Official Super Mario World CDs in 1991; Robot Vacuum Arms Race; and The Other Summer’s End Visual Novel.
I also published a decent number of posts outside my Things I Learned series. You can see the full selection in our January 2025 archive.
Newsletter Leaf Journal
I mailed our weekly newsletter on all four Saturdays in January.
- January 4: 2024 after story
- January 11: No branded Cybertruck (yet)
- January 18: 216th Inaugural
- January 25: Squash hat
In addition to recapping our new articles from the week, each newsletter comes packed with 21 links from around the web (each accompanied by my commentary), our most-visited articles of the week, and other news and notes.
Most-visited articles of January 2025
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 January 2025 and for the three month November 24-January 25 period.
I noted in the introduction that January surpassed December as our best-ever month that was not aided by Hacker News (which in turn made it our 5th strongest month to date, trailing August 2022, January 2024, May 2022, and April 2021). What was notable about January was not only our relatively strong numbers but also some surprises in the ranking.
The big surprises come in the top two positions. My Norton Safe Search had led the previous five monthly rankings and its January 2025 performance was consistent with its prior level. But it could not keep up with our top two. My Kaori After Story visual novel review began showing strength at the end of December 2024 and carried that over into 2025, becoming the first of my many visual novel reviews to lead a weekly ranking before also becoming the first to lead a monthly ranking. Kaori posted the most views in a single month since the Hacker News-aided Cycling Doping Fallacies exactly one year earlier in January 2024. Also telling was the fact that Kaori had more views in January 2025 than in all 12 months of 2024 when it was my 36th most-visited article of the year. The runner-up in January was arguably an even bigger surprise. An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram Alternative was our most-read article in January 2021 – but it had not been a factor in any of our rankings since late 2022. Due to a surge of interest in Pixelfed, it was our strongest article in the second half of January, but it ran out of runway to fully close the gap to Kaori. In the end, it was the best-ever month for my 2020 Pixelfed review, more than four years after I first published it.
Our top-24 featured a couple of other major surprises. Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria checked in at 6th with its best-ever month by a big margin. It had come in 9th place in October 2022, but its only subsequent top-24 placements were November 2022 (23rd) and December 2024 (22nd). The only January 2025 article to make our list was Brave Pumpkin in a Hat, which was our most-visited article in the waning days of January thanks to being shared in an external newsletter. It did well enough to check in at 11th despite having been published on January 20.
Taking leaf
January 2025 was an encouraging month in terms of visitor traffic, and I am seeing some early signs that we are carrying the momentum into February. More importantly, I have what I think are some fun article topics in the works, so I hope you check in regularly (may I suggest via RSS/ATOM/JSON feed?) to stay abreast of what is new at The New Leaf Journal.
