The end of another month means that it is time for new month in review post at The New Leaf Journal. We published 21 full-length articles in July. We also published many shorter Leaflet posts and made progress on our special Blogroll page.
Below, I present our July content (organized by category), our most-visited articles from July 2022, and other news and notes.
Content From July 2022
You can find a chronological list of all of our July 2022 articles in our article archive. For this month in review post, I will organize all of our July articles and Leaflets (with their links) into topical categories. You will find that fine articles are in bold. While I encourage you to read all of our content, you can consider the bold articles my “editor’s choice” picks for the month.
New Leaf Journal News and Notes
Leaflets
- Another Leaflet on HN Page 1 (July 13)
History
- The July 4 Death of James Monroe (July 4)
- The Life Masks of John Henri Isaac Browere (July 5)
- John Browere’s Death Mask of James Monroe (July 6)
Tech and Culture Essays
- Digital Purchases as Indefinite Rentals (July 10)
- Against Twitter as a Content Curator (July 11)
- Fediverse Clone Wars and Decentralized Social Media (July 12)
- Emojis, Corporations, and Censorship (July 13)
- The Many Deaths and Rebirths of RSS (July 22)
- Amazon Black Hat Seller Scenario (July 26)
- Cheap USB-C Hubs and Short-Lasting Tech (July 27)
- Nikon’s Long-Term Support for the D7100 (July 31)
Leaflets
- Configuring Cookies in Steam Account Settings (July 3)
- Chinese Domain Name Phishing Scam (July 5)
- “Large Amounts of Small Content” (July 13)
- Against Snapchat for the Web (July 19)
- My Thoughts on LibreOffice vs OpenOffice (July 30)
- Google Timer Killed By Google (July 31)
Tech Reviews
- Reviewing FrogFind: A Search Engine For Vintage Computers (July 24)
- Naver, Papago, and The (Korean) New Leaf Journal (July 28)
Leaflets
- Brief Look at the Oscobo Search Engine (July 1)
- EarthLink.net Search in Logs… (July 1)
- A Look at Lilo Search (July 8)
- What is Becovi Search? (July 10)
- Mokum Social Appears in Logs (July 13)
- A Set of Pharaoh Emojis (July 14)
- Manjaro Stable Updates RSS Feed (July 16)
- Let’s Look at the Gibiru Search Engine (July 20)
- Upgrading to Thunderbird 102 (July 21)
- Neuters – A Privacy Redirect For Reuters (July 22)
- Another Review of Koko Analytics (July 23)
- Mullvad VPN is Available on Amazon (July 26)
- Examining AlohaFind Search (July 28)
Webmaster Articles
- Discovering Google Webmaster Integrates With Search (July 25)
- Naver Webmaster Trials and Tribulations (July 28)
Justin & Justina Dialogue
- Dialogue: Alpacas, Virus Cures, and Paca Plus (July 16)
- Dialogue: “Skunks” in Staten Island Conspiracy (July 23)
Anime and Video Games
- School Days’ Sekai Becomes a VTuber? (July 7)
- Blaziken Starts a Troubling Trend (July 30)
Leaflets
- Interview With Producer of Hotel Mario (July 6)
- Thoughts on New Anime Take From Japan (July 21)
Music and Poetry
- The Robin Never Pecks Twice at a Cherry (July 19)
Leaflets
- Victor V. Gurbo Performs “Big Blue World Blues” (July 11)
- Victor V. Gurbo’s “Julia & John #2” (July 16)
Miscellaneous (All Leaflets)
- Why Would Anyone Believe Michael Jordan? (July 11)
- Japanese Student Suspended For Eyebrow Grooming (July 18)
- Unpersuasive Arguments Against Remote Work (July 20)
- A Note on Seeing From Along the Ray (July 24)
- Reports of Windows Start Menu Issues (July 25)
- Coffee Bean Reviews at coffeebeans.fyi (July 27)
- Pudding-Infused French Toast (SoraNews24) (July 31)
Newsletters (External Links)
Most-Visited Articles of July 2022
We use a privacy-friendly local analytics solution at The New Leaf Journal called Koko Analytics (see review). These statistics inform me how many views our articles have. Every month, I list our twelve most-visited articles according to Koko Analytics. Below, I present our 12 most-visited articles of July 2022.
| Rank | Article | Author | Published | 3-Month Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | What is Becovi Search? | NAF | July 10, 2022 | 5 |
| 2 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | March 14, 2021 | 3 |
| 3 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | November 27, 2021 | 4 |
| 4 | The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis | NAF | January 18, 2022 | 9 |
| 5 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) | NAF | July 5, 2022 | 6 |
| 6 | Biden, Lincoln, and Counting Back From the President’s Birth | NAF | April 29, 2022 | 7 |
| 7 | A Look at ProxiTok, a TikTok Frontend | NAF | May 14, 2022 | 13 |
| 8 | How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes | NAF | June 19, 2021 | 12 |
| 9 | Fediverse Clone Wars and Decentralized Social Media | NAF | July 12, 2022 | 30 |
| 10 | An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram Alternative | NAF | November 13, 2020 | 10 |
| 11 | The Last Stand of Constantine XI | NAF | May 30, 2020 | 8 |
| 12 | Peekier Search Engine Review | NAF | February 26, 2022 | 16 |
For the second time in three months, the top of our monthly ranking was a short Leaflet post that reached page one of Hacker News. While my brief Becovi review did not reach the same heights as the two Leaflets which dominated the May ranking (see my posts on a man uploading 2,000,000 YouTube videos and on the Lukol search engine), it was more than enough to secure the top spot in July. Other than my Fediverse clone wars essay making its debut top-12 in the month of its publication, the top 12 consisted entirely of articles that have appeared in previous 2022 top 12s. Our posts on the meaning of tsuki ga kirei and F-Droid apps, which have been the most consistent performers of 2022, had underwhelming performances in July when compared to previous months. However, July was our deepest month on record, presenting the highest bar for entry into the top 12. It was thanks in part to the depth of the July ranking that my 2021 post Calvin Coolidge’s 1926 Independence Day speech missed making its first top-12 despite accruing enough views to have made the list in any previous month.
Top Referrers
Koko Analytics also tracks referrers. Referrer tracking is imperfect. For example, while Koko Analytics is able to pick up on most search engine referrals, most referrals from Fediverse social media and Minds go undetected. However, I thought that it would be interesting to list our top-10 referrers according to Koko Analytics. I present the list below.
- google.com (Google Search)
- news.ycombinator.com (Hacker News)
- duckduckgo.com (DuckDuckGo Search)
- bing.com (Bing Search)
- yandex.ru (Yandex Search)
- google.ca (Google Search, Canada)
- search.brave.com (Brave Search)
- hckrnews.com (Alternative frontend for Hacker News)
- startpage.com (Startpage Search)
- t.co (Twitter)
The two notables on our referrer list are Yandex and Brave. We had slightly more than double the number of referrals from yandex.ru in July than we had any any previous month. The increase in referrals from Brave Search was also notable and perhaps a sign of increasing interest in the new and interesting search engine.
News and Notes
I did not make any significant changes to The New Leaf Journal in July. However, I have made progress toward turning our Blogroll page into an integral part of our broader project. Behind the scenes, I undertook efforts to improve our standing with Google Search after we had some indexing errors (most likely) caused in part by how we have implemented caching (caching again…) since the spring. I hope to see The New Leaf Journal fully recover in the Google index by the end of the current quarter.
August has traditionally been a somewhat slow month at The New Leaf Journal. However, I have a number of big projects in progress, so I look forward to changing that in 2022. Rather than spoil what I am working on here, I encourage you to regularly check in on The New Leaf Journal or, better yet, add us to your RSS/ATOM feed list and/or subscribe to our weekly newsletter to stay up to date with our latest content.