The first month of 2026 is in the books. With January 2026 completed, it is time to review the month that was in a tradition which goes all the way back to August 2020. Below, I share links to our new articles, short posts, and newsletters from January and other news and notes from the month that was.
New Leaf Journal Leaves From January
I published 12 articles in January 2026. The first two articles were left over from 2025 — my September and October 2025 and November and December 2025 month-end reviews. I had put off publishing those reviews due in part to switching from Koko Analytics to Statify and back to track page hits, but I needed to get them out of the way for my 4th article of 2026.
On January 7, I published Our Most-Visited Articles of 2025, continuing a year-end recap tradition that I started in our first year in 2020. After managing to put together our year-end article view statistics by combing our Koko Analytics (Jan 1-Sep 5, Dec 2-31, 2025) and Statify (Sep 6-Dec 1, 2025) data, I put together our ranking using the same view-total cutoff that I employed in 2024. However, many more articles 112 vs 81, qualified for the 2026 list (I also included in a shorter format articles 113-140). Because in 2025 we did not have an unusual article sharing event such as a Hacker News page one article, the top of the ranking should not be too surprising to people who followed our newsletters or were caught up on my month-end review pieces. I still plan to publish a separate Justin and Justina dialogue on 2025 (I meant to do that in January, but I forgot).
Also on January 7, I published Record vs Scoring Margin in NBA Team Analysis. This article was inspired by a story about the 2025-26 Los Angeles Lakers, which had, at the time I published the article, a 22-11 win-loss record, despite having been outscored through those 33 games. I used this as a prompt to further explore why it is important to look at scoring margin in addition to win-loss record in evaluating NBA teams, a point that has come up in some of my previous research articles. Update: The Lakers are now 30-19 as I write this review, meaning they have gone just 9-8 since I published my January 7 article. However, the Lakers’ NET Rating, referring to points scored per 100 possessions minus points allowed per 100, has improved from -0.2 to +0.2 (the averages are beginning to take over).
I published a second NBA-centric article on January 27. In NBA Champions After Losing MVPs/All NBA Players, I looked up every case in which a player won an NBA MVP or made an All NBA Team with one franchise, and was still active in the NBA and playing for a different franchise when the original team then won a championship without the services of the player. I was inspired to write this survey when it occurred to me that the Thunder won the 2024-25 championship without not one, but two traded players who won NBA MVP awards with the Thunder, Kevin Durant (2013-14) and Russell Westbrook (2016-17)
On January 11, I published two articles about my snowman-themed acquisitions. In Miya Snowman Cups From Ten Ichi Mart, I explained why I was compelled to buy two $20 snowman tea/coffee cups after having initially planned to buy just one. In Bonus Gifts with Usaburo Snowman Doll, I shared some fun extras I received with a snowman kokeshi doll that I purchased on Ebay.
On January 16, I published Cheap Winter Cherries, which is centered on cherries I purchased for a low price in February 2024. I took a photograph of those cherries, but it took me almost two years to turn it into a short article.
On January 20, I wrote an article on the news that PixelFade Studio, which published two visual novels that I reviewed back in 2022 (the second of those reviews was our most-visited article of 2025), is “retiring” and pulling its five visual novels off the market (see PixelFade Studio VN Review Project). While the visual novels will no longer be available for purchase, I announced my intention to review the three that I had not covered (along with a PSA for anyone who was interested in purchasing them before they were taken down).
I published two tech-themed articles on consecutive days. On January 21, I published Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine. DuckDuckGo has optional AI features that can be disabled. But to make things easier, it set up a no-AI by default version of DuckDuckGo. I explained how to configure it as a custom search engine with shortcut in Chromium- and Firefox-based browsers. The next day, I published Creating NLJ QR Code With QR Code Generator, wherein I used an open-source tool to make a thematically-colored QR code for our homepage.
I wrapped up the month with the story of My Heroic Car Rescue in Brooklyn Heights. The title may be a small exaggeration, but I did help a woman whose car was snow-encumbered by pushing it from behind as she wiggled it out of its spot. That gave me a new opportunity to discuss my very serious opinions on telling everyone about your acts of heroism.
The Emu Café Social Short Posts
I published 12 short-form posts on The Emu Café Social in January. I will share some of the highlights below.
I begin with some good news for the NLJ. In Using Cloudron’s IP Firewall, I wrote about a new step I have taken to fix some “crashing” issues on NLJ (early signs are promising).
I wrote two things I learned posts in November. In Things I Learned: Official Languages in Russia, I learned that in order for Russia to recognize a language as official, the language must use the Cyrillic alphabet. In Final EoL For Vista-based Windows Server 2008, I learned about the final end of support for the Windows Vista codebase.
The Vista article sparked a small amount of nostalgia, but not as much as I wrote about in Nostalgic News: Sega 32X Virtua Racing Has Been Decompiled. As I wrote in the NLJ in 2024, I actually had a Sega 32X and Virtua Racing back in the 90s, so it is neat to see it making news three decades after it was released. Continuing on the NLJ addenda theme, I covered another Brooklyn snowman in Snowman in Bed-Stuy URL Clues.
AI came up in a couple of articles. In AI is a Slop Tool, Not Slop Cause, I agreed with Jim Nielsen’s opinion that while AI is used to make slop, there was plenty of slop before our brave new LLM age. I also found myself Agreeing With Ebay’s Buy-For-Me Agent Restrictions.
In On the Matter of TikTok Alternatives, I offered my qualified disapproval of the survival of TikTok and of purported TikTok alternatives. Even if you take the CCP (mostly) out of TikTok, the problems with the format remain.
For 2000s NBA fans, I offered some thoughts on the short-lived and now largely-forgotten Carmelo Anthony-Allen Iverson Partnership on the Denver Nuggets from 2006-08.
Newsletter Leaf Journal
I mailed our weekly Newsletter on all five Saturdays in January, adding five new issues to our ever-growing collection (now numbering 265).
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXI 〜 Snow King Year
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXII 〜 2025 NLJ NetRtg
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXIII 〜 Wooden snowman
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXIV 〜 Footnote edition
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCLXV 〜 Car moving service
We had some Newsletter news on both NLJ and ECS in January. On ECS, I published New Newsletter Leaf Journal Sign-Up Page covered our revamped newsletter sign-up page on The New Leaf Journal, which unexpectedly ties into my QR code generator article (see NLJ section).
Most-Turned Leaves of January 2026
I use an entirely local, open source, and privacy friendly tool for tracking page visits called Koko Analytics (see my 2022 Koko Analytics review and five-year retrospective). In each month-end review, I list our 24 most-visited articles. I usually list our most visited articles over the previous three-month period, but I had briefly switched from Koko Analytics to another open source, local, and privacy-friendly plugin called Statify (September 5 through December 1, 2025), and cobbling together three month statistics would be too troublesome. Thus, for this month, I will note where each of our top-24 most-popular articles of January 2026 finished in our year-end ranking for 2025.
Analysis
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search had the seventh best month in terms of vistors in New Leaf Journal history, and the best month of any article that did not either make Hacker News page one or Expecting Rain (a Bob Dylan fan site). The previous unassisted visitor record was set by The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei all the way back in March 2022. You can see the full list of our 15 best months in a separate Leaflet Post (added 02/07/26).
Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search had a few other notable accomplishments in January. Firstly, it is the first article to have led a monthly ranking after winning a year-end ranking. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei came close in April 2024, but it could not quite close the deal. With its January win, it has now led six consecutive monthly rankings, only having been seriously challenged in August and September 2025. With that, it now has the second longest streak alone, trailing the eight consecutive month-end wins by The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei from September 2021 through April 2022.
While Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search had a dominant January, it was bested in the last full week of the month by one of our newest articles Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine, which did so well after being published on the 21st that it came in second place in the January ranking.
We did not have many big surprises in January. 7 of our top 10 articles in January ranked among the top 10 articles in 2025, and save for our runner-up article, all of our top-24 articles finished in the 2025 top-50. I did not expect to see The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum begin 2026 with a January top-5 in what was its second-best month (trailing only December 2023). I was also mildly surprised to see How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name as high as 8 (it typically peaks in the April-May period). In 24th we had Searching for School Days’ Nice Boat, which surprisingly out-performed School Days Anime and Nice Boat Review (I do not recall that happening before).
January 2026 was a very strong month overall, continuing the trend we saw beginning in September 2025. I look forward to seeing some new articles break into the ranking in February and March.
Taking leaf
I like to think I got 2026 off to a good start with my January output. Moreover, I did well given that I spent much of the latter half of January working on an exciting time-consuming project, which we will cover in detail in my February review. I expect to have many exciting new articles and projects to share next month, including many from my current backlog (consistent with the theme I announced in Winter Season 2026 at The New Leaf Journal).
