One of the most read posts at The New Leaf Journal was my article on our creation of a Twitter account. While it appears that quite a few people read the article, it did not lead to many Twitter followers. That is just as well – for while I am behind the Twitter account, I have no personal account to follow it with. Twitter is creepy. Its CEO is also creepy. A minority of users espouse original or pleasant thoughts, or do valuable work such as covering the ongoing riots in cities across the country. They are often lost in the sea of debauchery. Our Twitter account purports to have no lofty purpose, it exists for box-checking purposes and to garner passive impressions for our content.
But I digress.
A Twitter Discovery
I am here to inform you that while looking at our Twitter analytics – which are about what you would expect from our follower count – I figured out how to change our official Twitter handle. As I noted in my earlier Twitter article post, Twitter automatically converted the account nickname, “The New Leaf Journal,” into the Twitter handle “Leaf_Journal.” While I had no problem with Leaf_Journal” per se, it was not exactly the best handle for our site. But given that I am not invested in Twitter beyond creating a feed that has a minor chance of showing me something useful when I log in to do something and post some of our content to generate low-effort impressions, I was certainly not going to create an additional account. The scales fell from my eyes when I learned that I could rename our account – so you can find us at @newleafjournal on Twitter. More fitting, I will say.
Why is this Noteworthy?
Why does this warrant an article? There are some links in our older content going to the original Twitter handle. I tried creating a redirect, but I am not sure that it will work. If it does not, I will go back and manually re-do the older links in order that our beloved search engine bots do not think that I am administering a sloppy website with dead-end links everywhere. I have fixed the Twitter share and follow buttons, however, so if any of you are so unfortunate as to have Twitter accounts, you can follow us in order to make your Twitter feed slightly less unaesthetic or share our content to give your own followers something pleasant to read (although I may be The New Leaf Journal’s most enthusiastic spokesman, I cannot claim that we can turn water into wine, or make Twitter aesthetic).
Begrudgingly Thanking Twitter for the Filler Prompt
While Twitter is and continues to be a depressing platform, I must concede that my discovering the ability to change the Twitter handle saved me with a filler article prompt. I had no article prepared, and I am in the midst of reviewing a 1,000-page response to a Freedom of Information Act Request as part of drafting a legal opinion, which is squeezing me a bit on the article production front. Let no one say that being a detached Twitter account manager provides nothing.
A Somewhat-Specious How-To Guide for Changing Your Twitter Handle
Before I conclude, allow me to present a brief how-to guide on how to change your Twitter handle. This is only necessary if you decide not to do the right thing, which is to either not make a Twitter account in the first place or to delete the Twitter account you mistakenly made in the past. Please note that the first two steps in this guide are only for changing your Twitter handle on desktop. It should come as no surprise that I declined to tarnish my BlackBerry Classic with the Twitter app, so I have no idea what the mobile version of it looks like.
Time needed: 1 minute.
How to Change your Twitter Handle
- On the left sidebar of your Twitter homepage, click “More.” (Desktop)
Only applies to desktop. I have enough problems with spam calls on my phone. I do not need Twitter spam and tracking too.
- Clicking “More” brings up a new menu. On that menu, click “Settings and privacy.” (Desktop)
Also only applies to desktop. See the above step for an explanation about why I do not know what the Twitter mobile app looks like
- Arrive at, or go to, twitter.com/settings/account while you are logged in.
You can skip the first two steps and use this URL. Only for the most advanced power users.
- Change your username.
Click “Account” on the left menu on the account page. Then on the right, click “Username.” You can change your “Username” here. Your new Username cannot have more than 15 characters, for whatever it is worth.
- Remember…
Remember that changing your username, or Twitter handle, also changes your Twitter URL. It appears after “twitter.com/[username]” Thus, if you have more than six followers, you might want to be judicious in changing your username. You can change your Twitter name without affecting the URL. To use an example from our name, our Twitter name is “The New Leaf Journal.” Our new Twitter username, or Twitter handle, is @newleafjournal, it was previously @leaf_journal. Changing the latter moved our homepage from twitter.com/leaf_journal to twitter.com/newleafjournal.
Wrapping Up
This concludes my Twitter epiphany and how-to guide. I will post an article on Twitter more days than not. If you are unfortunate enough to have a Twitter account, please consider following us. The same applies for those of you who use Facebook (Victor diligently maintains our Facebook page) or Pinterest (I maintain our Pinterest account, and while I have no interest in making my own, I will say that it is far preferable to Twitter). For most readers, however, it is far easier to just bookmark https://thenewleafjournal.com, subscribe to our main newsletter and RSS newsletter, and/or subscribe to our RSS feed (https://thenewleafjournal.com/feed) with your favorite RSS reader (if you are a cool person like me who defies the tech oligarchs and still uses an RSS reader, that is).
Thank you as always for reading and following The New Leaf Journal, and I look forward to producing some slightly more interesting content throughout the week.
