I note often, especially in our newsletters, that I use a privacy-friendly local analytics solution called Koko Analytics to see how many hits our articles receive (see my review of Koko Analytics). These Koko Analytics statistics allowed me to publish rankings of our most-viewed articles in 2021 and 2020 (note that we briefly used Google Analytics from April 27, 2020 through July 10, 2020, before switching permanently to Koko on July 11, 2021 – meaning a small percentage of our 2020 statistics were from Google instead of Koko). One article that featured in both our 2020 and 2021 reviews was my May 30, 2020 piece on the last stand of Constantine XI. This history article was the second most-read article of 2020 and the eighth most-read article of 2021 (note that it surpassed its entire 2020 total in multiple individual months in 2021 and 2022, highlighting the fact that the site has grown a bit since its humble origins). I was happy to see that my Constantine XI article surpassed its 2021 visitor numbers for the current year at some point in early August and is currently sitting comfortably in sixth place in the 2022 article standings (and first among 2020 articles). It also posted its best single-month in May 2022, albeit it was not reflected in its sixth-place finish for the month due to a strangely strong debut month by a certain presidential history article and two Hacker News-induced high performers. In any event, I am happy to see one of the earliest New Leaf Journal articles (it was our 32nd article) continue to grow.
To celebrate Constantine XI’s continued success, I made several improvements to the original article. The most significant improvement is that I re-formatted the long quotes in the article as block quotes (for whatever reason, I appear to have been averse to block quotes when I wrote that article – it is possible that they did not display well on the theme that we were using at the time). I also added a couple of sentences with links to two subsequent articles that I published on Constantine XI’s last stand (see article on the last vespers at Hagia Sophia and one version of the story that has Constantine’s body being identified after his death). I also made a few typo fixes, including one embarrising “Ottoman’s” – that was not right! If you read the article before, I encourage you to revisit the current, prettier version of it (and in so doing, support Constantine XI’s bid to secure a high position on the article ranking charts).