Welcome to the (syndicated) version of The Newsletter Leaf Journal edition 143, originally mailed on Saturday, July 8, 2023. This newsletter featured an unusual weekly article ranking, links to our newest posts, and your usual assortment of links from around the web and other news and notes. We offer several ways to follow the newsletter in addition to email or waiting for the syndicated version here. See all of our options. Below, I present Newsletter 143 as it originally appeared, save for the modified introduction here.

Leaves from the week that was

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I published four regular articles since mailing Newsletter 142.

Many of the featured pieces on our 24 most-visited articles of the first half of 2023 will comes as little surprise to newsletter readers. But beyond the top 10, you will find a few articles which have not been mainstays in our weekly most-visited article rankings.

An 1829 account of a British explorer visiting the grave of Benjamin Franklin, with my own commentary, notes, and up-to-date information about the site.

We begin with a children’s bedtime story for July 4 and conclude with Benjamin Franklin’s thoughts on eagles and turkeys.

Instead of spoiling this article, which is accurately described by my headline, I will note that I am pleased with what I put together.

I published two short articles to go with my four regular articles.

This question was prompted by something we will get to in my weekly article ranking…

An NYPD tweet about a heartwarning rescue of a coyote from the East River triggers the most dull sort of Twitter reply.

Leaves from around the web

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My word count was a bit light this week. But fear not. Here are 12 links from around the web to help fill your reading weekend…

Back in January 2023, a pigeon in need learned that the editors of The New Leaf Journal are there for pigeons in need.

While I am sure that it tastes good, I remain unconvinced that this is the best use of whipped cream.

I do not have much interest in Bluesky, but allowing people to create handles with their own domains is a very good feature.

“Every winter, hundreds of thousands of monarch butterflies migrate from Canada and the United States to central Mexico where they hibernate. For decades, deforestation, herbicides, and pest diseases in the United States and Mexico have threatened butterfly habitats. During the 2022-2023 season, the hibernating population dropped by 22%, according to the World Wildlife Fund Mexico. But individuals like Carrillo are working to protect butterfly habitats.”

I am obviously more of the view that you need to hew closely to your niche (looks shifty).

Some promising trends in TikTok viewership (depending on your perspective, of course).

Unlike most reports, this one has the actual text describing the behaviors that numerous Federal agencies are now enjoined from engaging in.

An interesting look at one of the central points of contention in the Supreme Court’s recent decision in Counterman v. Colorado.

It takes good people skills to rally a community to save a frog.

It is probably good. But it looks strange.

Recent trends in NBA play style are not favorable to some of the traditional 7-foot prospects.

Thanks to Victor V. Gurbo, you know that all New Leaf Journal content is rated FAMILY FRIENDLY (see The Old Leaf Journal below).

The Old Leaf Journal

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Let’s dig into our archive…

Where Victor V. Gurbo explained that The New Leaf Journal is a family website (he also explained some music history and the consequences of TikTok addiction).

The second birthday of one of our most-read articles just passed.

Start with his life masks…

…Then see his death mask…

It was a good week for benches at The New Leaf Journal (see next section), but this bench sits in the shadows.

It was also a good week for short anime heroines at The New Leaf Journal (see below), but it was not Futaba’s week (Futaba is having a quietly decent year, however).

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter 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 for 2023 newsletter week 27.

(It was a strange week.)

  1. Height differences in anime romances (NAF, 3.22.23)
    2023 Appearances: 2
    Top Placements: 1
  2. Brooklyn Banana Bench Photo (NAF, 4.2.21)
    2023 Appearances: NEW
  3. The Enigmatic Life and Death of Emperor Otho (NAF, 4.18.21)
    2023 Appearances: 2
  4. Heights in “The Dangers in My Heart” Anime (NAF, 4.2.23)
    2023 Appearances: 6
  5. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (NAF, 3.14.21)
    2023 Appearances: 27
    Top Placements: 9

As I said, it was a strange week… Beyond the unusual top two, I also noted that all five articles were published in 2021 and 2023 and in March and April. Go figure. I would not have remembered when I published the runner-up without looking.

My long essay on height differences in anime romances made a cameo top weekly ranking appearance four weeks ago and did well enough for the rest of the month to finish in sixth place in our June ranking. I was inspired to write the essay when I saw a preview for a new anime romantic comedy featuring a very short female protagonist. That anime, My Tiny Senpai, debuted last week. It seems like many Google searchers wanted to know the height of the protagonist. My article, which was more about other anime romances with notable height differences, inadvertently benefited from the windfall. The Height Differences piece had the best week since my Fire Emblem Engage strategy guide at its peak. While I think it has already seen its best days, it is doing well enough that it may continue to feature in the ranking in the upcoming weeks. It is also the first time that an article primarily about anime has topped the weekly ranking (my tsuki ga kirei article was inspired by an anime but is not primarily about anime).

While I was surprised by the success of my height differences article, I was not shocked since it had a fairly good June on the whole. My 2021 article about a banana bench, which is one of the shortest full articles I have ever published, was a bigger surprise. I can tell from our referrers that someone shared it on Facebook. Who? I have no idea. If it was you, feel free to tell me where and why. The banana bench article received enough recorded visits to be number one in the rank in most recent weeks, but it picked the wrong week to go for gold. I assume it is a one-hit wonder (banana bench has never made an impression on the rankings before), but maybe its Facebook success will continue into the next week.

Spots three through five saw returning articles from last week. My Otho post, which made its top-five debut after more than two years online, returned with an even stronger week to take third place. My second article on anime height differences came in fourth after four consecutive weeks in second (two of which barely missed first). My tsuki ga kirei post had one of its weaker weeks, which resulted in a rare fifth place finish, but it still made its 115th consecutive top five (going back to April 2021) by a comfortable margin.

While the tsuki ga kirei article’s streak extends to 115, my article on the now-defunct Peekier search engine saw its streak of 18 consecutive top fives come to an end one week after my Fire Emblem Engage article’s streak of 20 was snapped. I thought it would be fun to look at our longest top-five streaks (going back to January 2021, I did not keep weekly rankings for 2020):

  1. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
    2021 NLW 17 to Present (115 weeks, active)
  2. Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021)
    2021 NLW 51 to 2022 NLW 31 (33 weeks)
  3. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013)
    2021 NLW 42 to 2022 NLW 20 (31 weeks)
  4. How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes
    2021 NLW 34 to 2022 NLW 6 (25 weeks)
  5. Reviewing the HALOmask and är Mask
    2021 NLW 1 to 23 (23 weeks)
  6. Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage
    2023 NLW 6 to 25 (20 weeks)
  7. Peekier Search Engine Review
    2023 NLW 9 to 26 (18 weeks)

We saw the sixth and seventh longest top five streaks end in the last two weeks. The longest active streak other than the elephant on the Moon (see what I just did there?) with its 115 consecutive weekly top fives is now my Leaflet on heights in The Dangers In My Heart anime, which has notched five consecutive top fives. It does have a second anime season coming up next January, but I doubt that will be enough to keep it in the top five for another thirteen weeks in a row in order to match Peekier.

News leaf journal

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I mentioned last week that I made contact with a real person regarding our now-seven month Bing ban for the first time. Unfortunately, there have been no more updates. Bing has supposedly been reviewing the site since June 20. I requested an update but received no response. Alas, we continue to wait to see if Bing identifies a reason why it rendered it our site not indexable, which would be some reason unknown to Google, Yandex, Brave, Mojeek, Marginalia, and other independent web crawlers and indexes.

Notable leaf journal

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On Wednesday of last week, a Hacker News user asked people to submit their own blogs (see thread). I caught the thread, which generated 1896 comments, a bit late. Fortunately, I was able to contribute The New Leaf Journal (it generated a rush of homepage visits… I probably would have done well to add a few articles to my post). Some enterprising Hacker News readers decided to collect all of the submitted blogs. One individual collected more than 1100 submitted blogs in an OPML file on GitHub. Another created an open source site with links to all of the submitted blogs and articles from the blogs which crossed a minimum Hacker News points threshold (you will see we have three articles on the list). The blogs have a heavy tech focus (I dare say we are one of the least tech-y blogs on the list), but I encourage everyone to browse and find some sites to add to your feed collections.

Taking leaf

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Thank you as always for reading and following The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you have not done so already, you can receive our Saturday newsletters by signing up with your email or adding our newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader. See our sign-up options. I also syndicate the newsletter to The New Leaf Journal (I target Mondays, but actual date sometimes varies).

We had an interesting first week of July, and I look forward to publishing new articles and seeing what other forgotten articles pop up in our weekly rankings in the coming weeks.

Until July 15,

Cura ut valeas.