Welcome to the syndicated version of the 130th Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of The New Leaf Journal.  We mailed the original newsletter on Saturday, April 8, 2023.  Below, you will find the newsletter reprinted just as it was originally mailed, with the only difference being that it has a different introduction.  If you enjoy our weekly recaps, links from around the web, and other news and notes, I encourage you to consider signing up to receive our flagship Saturday newsletter via email or adding its RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (see options).  In the alternative, I syndicate our newsletters here on Mondays.

I published four regular articles and six short posts since mailing the previous newsletter.

Leaves from the week that was

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I published four regular articles and six short posts since mailing the previous newsletter.

Regular leaves

Leaflets & Leaf Buds

Now for our short posts…

Leaves from around the web

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I decided to post 12 links from around the web instead of 10 going forward. This is because I save more than 12 links for future newsletters each week, and the list is already growing link..

The Old Leaf Journal

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Let’s dig into our archive…

Most-turned leaves of the week

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I list our most-read articles from the previous newsletter week (Friday to Saturday) in each edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. These statistics come courtesy of Koko Analytics, our local, privacy friendly page-counting solution (see my review). Below, I present the 5 most-visited articles of the 14th newsletter week of 2023.

  1. Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage
    2023 appearances: 9.
    Top placements: 8.
  2. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
    2023 appearances: 14.
    Top placements: 5.
  3. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis
    2023 appearances: 11.
  4. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013)
    2023 appearances: 9.
    Top placements: 1.
  5. Peekier Search Engine Review
    2023 appearances: 7.

There were no surprises in our newsletter 14 top five most-visited articles. The top five articles are the five most-read articles of 2023 thus far, albeit slightly out of order. My Fire Emblem Engage essay took the top spot for the eighth week in a row, and while its page view totals are not overwhelming by New Leaf Journal historical standards, none of its eight weeks atop the ranking have been particularly close.

While the last week was a bit underwhelming in terms of total visits as we continue to see the effects of being blacklisted without explanation by Microsoft Bing (and all derivatives thereof, one being the subject of our fifth most-read article of the week), I was encouraged to see that the views were better distributed this week than they had been in recent weeks. One new article, my excessively long review of the recently-finished The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten anime series, took 10th place in the weekly standings, marking it as an article to watch on these lists going forward.

I slightly changed the display settings in our theme for wide screen displays to fix a text display issue on archive pages. It fixed some, but not all, of the issues (text sometimes runs over the date marker).

I wrote last week that I would look into why The New Leaf Journal site occasionally became unresponsive. After poking around, I determined that the cause may have been how one compression setting I had in our .htaccess file was interacting with our caching plugin. I removed that part of our .htaccess file on Wednesday and have not noticed any downtime since, so I think that the issue is resolved.

See my two caching posts in “leaves from the week that was” for the only other two notable events from the week.

Notable leaf journal

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I have been using the Handy Reading feed reader/read-it-later app for Android (available on F-Droid) for a couple of weeks. While it is not perfect, it does just about everything I want from a local feed reading app. That it combines feed reading with read-it-later functionality is a boon to my reading flow. I plan to review it in the somewhat near-future, but I am working out a few minor issues with the app first. One of those was preventing the app from re-fetching previously-read articles from feeds and displaying them as new. I am making progress. You can read my preliminary thoughts at The New Leaf Annex on Bear Blog:

(I figured that given the Bing situation, I should probably take advantage of the side-blog I set up on Bear Blog.)

Taking leaf

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This concludes the 130th issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Thank you as always for reading. If you enjoyed the content, consider signing up for our Saturday newsletters via email or adding the newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (no “sign-up” required for the RSS option). I also syndicate the newsletter to The New Leaf Journal on Mondays. See all of our options for following the newsletter here.

Until April 14,

Cura ut valeas.