March 2022 marked our first full month at our new home with Hetzner. We published 25 articles including this one and made several notable additions to The New Leaf Journal.
Below, I will review the month that was and look forward to what promises to be an exciting April as The New Leaf Journal approaches its second birthday.
Articles From The Month That Was
We published 25 new articles at The New Leaf Journal in March. I recommend browsing our March archive to find content that interests you. Below, I will present the articles in list form before singling out several posts for special mention.
All March 2022 Posts
Article Highlights
I published reviews of two interesting and entirely free indie visual novels. First, I published a review and analysis of the English translation of Shooting Star Hill, a freeware indie visual novel from Japan that was originally released in 2005. Second, I published a review of Save the Date, a freeware English-language visual novel that was released in 2013.
On March 5, I published an article about the humans.txt file and explained why I decided to add one to The New Leaf Journal.
In February 2021, I published an article about some Japanese schools requiring Japanese students with naturally non-black hair to dye their hair . On March 12, I published a follow-up piece about the Tokyo Metropolitan Board of Education prohibiting municipal high schools within its jurisdiction from imposing that requirement on students with naturally non-black hair.
My colleague Victor V. Gurbo published his first music article of 2022. In the post, he detailed the history of blues legend Big Joe Williams’ nine-string guitar before explaining how he built his own nine-string.
We appreciate the seasons here at The New Leaf Journal. In line with that spirit, I published an article to welcome spring full of plum blossoms, poetry, and a bit of history.
On March 28, I published an essay about DRM-free games on Steam and expressed by hope that Steam makes it easier for users to discover DRM-free games in its marketplace. Sticking with the video game theme for the month, I published an article about a classic game magazine April Fools joke from 2001.
Most-Read Articles in March 2022
I list our twelve most-visited articles of the month in all of my month-in-review articles. Below, you will find the twelve most-visited articles of March 2022 along with their ranks for the first quarter of 2022 (Jan-March 2022). The statistics come courtesy of our privacy-friendly local analytics solution, Koko Analytics. You can learn more about Koko Analytics in my January review of the WordPress plugin.
| Rank (Change) | Article | Author | Published | Q1 2022 Rank |
| 1 (NC) | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | Mar. 14, 2021 | 1 |
| 2 (NC) | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | Nov. 27, 2021 | 2 |
| 3 (NC) | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) | NAF | July 5, 2021 | 3 |
| 4 (+1) | How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes | NAF | June 19, 2021 | 4 |
| 5 (-1) | The Last Stand of Constantine XI | NAF | May 30, 2020 | 6 |
| 6 (SR) | Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGo | NAF | Aug. 8, 2021 | 8 |
| 7 (NEW) | Peekier Search Engine Review | NAF | Feb. 28, 2022 | 19 |
| 8 (NC) | Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) | NAF | Nov. 15, 2020 | 7 |
| 9 (+16) | Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) | NAF | July 28, 2021 | 14 |
| 10 (+1) | Sending SMS Messages From My Computer With XMPP Through JMP | NAF | Sep. 8, 2021 | 10 |
| 11 (+10) | Review of the Teracube 2e Smartphone | NAF | Nov. 19, 2021 | 16 |
| 12 (NC) | How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name | NAF | Mar. 11, 2021 | 12 |
Assessment
The top-six articles from February returned in almost the same order – with only 4th and 5th place swapping places. My March 2021 article on the phrase tsuki ga kirei not only topped the monthly ranking for the seventh month in a row and ninth time in eleven months, but also posted its best month overall in terms of the number of page visits. Three articles made their top-12 debuts. My review of Peekier, which I published on the last day of February 2022, came in an impressive seventh in what was effectively its debut month. My piece on installing LineageOS on a Nexus 7 and my review of the Teracube 2e smartphone made their first top 12 appearances in their eighth and fourth full months on site respectively.
Rounding Out the Quarterly Top 15
I published our quarterly top-15 rankings in our September and December 2021 month in review pieces. For this quarter-in-review, I will list the five articles that ranked in the top 15 for the quarter but were not present in our March top 12.
| Q1 2022 Rank | Article | Published | Author |
| 5 | Reviewing the HALOmask and är Mask | Dec. 2, 2020 | VVG |
| 9 | An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram Alternative | Nov. 13, 2020 | NAF |
| 11 | A Follow-Up Post on the Meaning of “Blob Dylan” | Apr. 12, 2021 | NAF |
| 13 | Ghostwriter Markdown Editor Review | Oct. 7, 2021 | NAF |
| 15 | “Casey’s Revenge” – Grantland Rice’s 1896 Reply Poem to “Casey at Bat” | Aug. 26, 2021 | NAF |
My Pixelfed review was one of three articles going into March that had featured in every top 12 since January 2021. The other two were (and remain) my Persona 4 Golden artbook review and my piece on the last stand of Constanine XI. Because the Pixelfed piece was also the most-read article of November and December 2020, it featured in the top-12 for 16 consecutive months. Below, you will find the longest active top-12 streaks. Although I only started publishing rankings in 2021, I will include 2020 results for this list.
- The Last Stand of Constantine XI (21 months)
- Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) (16 months)
- The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (11 months)
- Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) (9 months)
- How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes (8 months)
While Constantine’s streak is impressive, the 2020 rankings were quite soft compared to later rankings. For that reason, the best measure is to count from January 2021 – which leaves both Constantine and my Persona 4 digital artbook review with 15 consecutive top-12s.
Most-Visited March Article
Because my Peekier review was published on the last day of February, it was a March article for all normal intents and purposes. However, our best-performing article that technically debuted in March was Tokyo High Schools Change Hair Color Dress Code Policies, which collected enough visits after being published on March 13 to come in at a solid 23rd place in the monthly ranking.
March 2022 as a Whole
March 2022 was our third best month at The New Leaf Journal in terms of total visits, trailing only March 2021 and January 2022. For those who may wonder why March 2021 was our strongest month, I explained why our month-in-review piece from 12 months ago.
Looking Ahead to April 2022
The New Leaf Journal will celebrate its second birthday on April 27, 2022. It goes without saying that you can expect a celebration in line with the first birthday article that I published for the occasion last year.
I am trying to add an elegant Activity Stream to The New Leaf Journal. If I can get my preferred method working, you should expect to see that new section pop up in April. You should also expect to find a blogroll/web ring section in the very near future.
On the site’s back-end, I will work on adding more meta descriptions to our tags and categories to make them more amenable to search engines.
Readers of The New Leaf Journal are likely more interested in our content than any technical changes to the site. While I have learned not to promise specific articles, I will list some projects that may see the light of day in April.
- Reviews of Ubuntu Touch and LineageOS on Nexus 7 (2013)
- List of the best anime of 2021 (a bit late, I know)
- Article on the Pine Time smartwatch
- Using DecSync for RSS feeds and contact/calendar/task synchronization
- Using Zim as a local alternative to Goodreads (and more)
- Articles on Libreture and Inventaire
- Several visual novel reviews
- Several book reviews
- New piece on the short-lived Roman Emperor, Otho (but not 18,000 words like last April)
- I will let you know when I know
Suffice it to say, I do not know exactly what you will find on The New Leaf Journal in April, but I trust that it will be entertaining enough if you generally enjoy our content. If you are reading this article well after March 31, you can check back to see if I delivered good content.