At the end of every month, I review the month that was in The New Leaf Journal. This tradition goes back five years to August 2020. Speaking of August, it is almost the end of August 2025, and I have yet to publish my review of the month that was in July 2025. The reasons for this are myriad and explained generally in my review of the months that were at The New Leaf Journal in May and June of 2025, which was also published in the latter third of August. But as the sayings better late than never and all’s well that ends well suggest, it is never too late to review the month that was in July.
July was our most exciting New Leaf Journal and Emu Café Social month in some time, so below I will link to my writings from the month, provide some background context on how the posts came to be, and offer some news and notes (including our most-visited article ranking) that should be of interest to our legions of fans.
New NLJ Leaves From July
I published 13 new New Leaf Journal articles in July. I present the links to the new articles below along with some notes on how they came to be.
Sports
My first article titled NBA Championship Droughts surprisingly covered NBA championship droughts. I initially thought of the idea when the star-crossed New York Knicks, which had and still have a championship drought dating back to 1972-73, appeared in their first Eastern Conference Finals since the 1999-00 season (the initial inspiration is evinced by my photo choice for the article). The Knicks drought continuesas the Oklahoma City Thunder won the championship and ended their own drought dating back to their Seattle SuperSonics era (1978-79), and thereby ensured that my article topic remained timely.
I published two articles on climbing times at the 2025 Tour de France. In Pogačar Chases Riis on Hautacam, I wrote about the ultimate winner of the Tour, Tadej Pogačar, chasing Bjarne Riis’ record-breaking climb on Hautacam in 1996. I had referenced Mr. Riis’ famous (or infamous) rampage up Hautacam in our most-visited article of 2024, Cycling Doping Fallacies. While I was on the climbing subject, I offered one of my best all-time titles in Ventoux Too: Pogačar’s New TDF Climbing Record, wherein I covered how Mr. Pogačar, along with three other riders, shattered Iban Mayo’s 2004 record-fast time on Mont Ventoux.
Internet Expectations
In On Online Reader Expectations, I was prompted by a post about trends in travel writing to consider why people reading things on the internet have expectations about how those things are structured. Less mysterious is why people may expect to see AI crammed into everything, as I discussed in On Forcing AI Where It Does Not Belong, which was also prompted by an article I read.
NLJ and Technology
On July 12, 2025, I wrote about accidentally turning our full-text RSS feed into an excerpt-only feed while cleaning up options in our WordPress database in Full Text RSS Mishap. I used it as an opportunity to re-up some of my earlier posts on feed presentation.
I celebrated five years of using Koko Analytics to check in on how popular (relatively speaking) our articles are in Five Years of the Koko Analytics WordPress Plugin. I last covered Koko Analytics in 2022 and was content to simply note what has changed in Koko since then without writing a new review. That would have left me with little material for an article, so I decided to include a list of the 60-most visited New Leaf Journal articles from July 11, 2020 through July 11, 2025, according to Koko Analytics.
Laundry
I broke new ground at The New Leaf Journal when I published four articles in a five-article stretch having to do with laundry. Overheard: I am THE MAT was a report on an exchange I heard in Brooklyn Heights. I wondered what it could mean. Happy Cleaners Cargo Trike in Gowanus is a photo post and spiritual successor to my surprisingly popular look at Amazon’s eCargo bikes. In Window Washing Machine Couple in Ridgewood, I published a photo post which had been sitting on my to-do list since May 2024. Finally, inspired by all the laundry talk, I shared in detail the story of my first Linux experience in The Death of Windows XP and My First Linux Netbook. What does that have to do with laundry? I primarily used Linux the first time in a laundromat. I had previously referenced my first Linux experience back in 2020, but it took five years to fully develop the story.
Miscellaneous Photo Posts
I saw the campaign car of an independent candidate for New York City Mayor in July. That photo turned into Jim Walden’s NYC Mayor Campaign Car, which included a humorous look at the mayoral election. My last article of July, Inflatable Gnone in Bikini in Brooklyn, was my fourth article to cover inflatable decorations at a certain residence in Cobble Hill.
New Leaves On Related Projects
I published 20 short posts on our sister site, The Emu Café Social. You can find all 20 in our July 2025 archive. I will single out six for special mention here.
A certain online hacking(?) incident reminded me of the infamous turn-of-the-century Nintendo 64 game, Conker’s Bad Fur Day, as I explained in the cleverly titled (if I do say so myself) Elmo’s Bad Fur Day. In Blocking Independent Search Crawlers, I advised fellow webmasters who reasonably want to block AI crawlers to not inadvertently block well-behaved crawlers from independent search engines, which I dare say are important as AI tries to consume traditional search. I revisited blinding car headlines in Congresswoman Glusenkamp Perez Tackles Headlights. In Ullrich’s Col de la Madeleine Record Stands, I noted that, while multiple climbing records fell in the 2025 Tour, the Peloton did not threaten Jan Ullrich’s stunning mid-stage ascent of Col de la Madeleine in the 1998 Tour. I concurred with a take about a winter 2025 anime called OKITSURA: Fell in Love with an Okinawan Girl, but I Just Wish I Know What She’s Saying in Unrequited Loves in OKITSURA Anime.
I missed entirely what would have been the first weekly newsletter in July, but I mailed the latter three.
- Newsletter 236: First championship in three weeks
- Newsletter 237: No bonus soda, alas
- Newsletter 238: Laundry cycling
While I do use the newsletters to recap my most recent posts, each issue comes with original content in the form of links from around the web (with my commentary), lists of our most-visited articles of the week (see what is popular!), and other news and notes. There is something to read in the Newsletter even if you are caught up on The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social.
The Old Leaf Journal
2025 marked our sixth July at The New Leaf Journal. To commemorate the occasion, I present five articles from past Julys.
- Ko Ko for Koko Analyics – Early Impressions (July 16, 2020)
Little did I know when I published my very early first impressions of Koko Analytics that I would publish a five-year anniversary article almost five years to the day. - Fairy Tricycle Promotion from 1895 Harper’s Round Table (July 16, 2021)
It then took four years for me to publish another post on something with three wheels. - The Many Deaths and Rebirths of RSS (July 22, 2022)
Before I accidentally killed our full-text RSS feed for about 24 hours, I wrote about how RSS has a tendency to “die” and be “born again” (all somehow while never really changing). - The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses Ep1 Animation (July 10, 2023)
I was inspired by some articles about the “controversial” cinematography in the first episode of an otherwise nondescript middle school romantic comedy to tackle the animation in the first episode in some detail. - Inflatable Uncle Sam Rides a Rocket (July 4, 2024)
Seen in front of the same home which brought us the bikiki-clad gnome I wrote about on July 31, 2025.
Most-turned leaves of July 2025
I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to count page views (Koko Analytics works entirely locally – you can read my 2022 review. Each month, I list our most-visited articles according to Koko Analytics. Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of July 2025 and for the three month period covering May-July.
My article on Tadej Pogačar’s performance on Hautacan at the 2025 Tour de France snagged the top spot in July despite only being published on the 20th, thanks I believe due to it being shared on some cycling fora. While it also posted the most views of any individual article since April, it came close to losing the monthly ranking crown to a late-charging Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search, which finished second on the month and moved from 24th to 2nd in the three-month ranking. Speaking of the three month ranking, we had a changing of the guard, with Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn ascending to first-place in the May-July ranking after finishing third in the July-only ranking (following first-place finishes in the months of May and June). Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships, which had led every three-month ranking from February-June, fell to sixth on the three-month list (May-July) after a disappointing 20th place finish in July.
July, which was our second-best month of 2025 and thus far behind January (third on a per-day basis behind January and February), saw the return of some old stand-bys to the monthly ranking. Height differences in anime romances missed the top-24 in June but posted a fifth-place finish in July, which was its best mark since September 2023 (second). Its big moment came two Julys prior when it led the monthly ranking in dominating fashion. Our top article of 2024 (thanks to a single Hacker news surge) Cycling Doping Fallacies rode the slipstream of my two new high-performing cycling articles into its first monthly placement since February 2024. Popping in at 23rd was How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes, which was a regular in the monthly rankings in 2021 and 2022, but took until July to make its first appearance in 2025.
Conclusion
I will not preview August in this recap article since this is being published in August, but July was a busy enough month to deserve a stand-alone review, even if it was a very late review. I look forward to publishing the rest of the 2025 month-end reviews until a more timely manner.
