March 2025 and the first quarter of the new year are in the book. The end of the month means that it is time for our regular New Leaf Journal month-end review, a tradition which goes back to August 2020. Below, I present our vernal March leaves, most-visited articles, and other news and notes from the month that was.
New March Leaves
I published 13 new New Leaf Journal articles in March, with one being our February review. While March did not rank highly in terms of word count, I picked up the pace in the latter half of the month, with 9 articles being published between March 13 and 31.
My first article of March was Good Internet Writing Habits. Here, I responded to a query on another blog about how to write and post regularly. In fact, allow me to take you the reader behind the scenes as I explain how my new March articles fit into the theme of Good Internet Writing Habits.
In Pacman (Linux) Update Issue, I wrote about how I resolved an issue upgrading packages on my main workstation. I did not plan to have a problem, much less write about it, but after having spent 15-20 minutes diagnosing the issue and finding a solution, I figured that I may as well turn it into a new article. It was fun learning on April 1 that at least one reader found my Linux anecdote helpful.
Reading articles written by others is a great way to find inspiration for your own posts. Moreover, inspiration strikes in different ways. In Creators and More and More Content, I offered my negative opinion of social media marketing jargon in a report. In Dunkin’ Donuts Are Not All The Same, I used a story about a serial Dunkin’ Donuts robber as inspiration to share my memories from two Dunkin’ locations I frequented, one while in high school and the other in college. Pokémon and Pokémon Go in Saudi Arabia was prompted by news that a Saudi Arabian company acquired the developer of Pokémon Go. I recalled that Saudi Arabia “banning” Pokémon was a story back in the early 2000s, so I undertook a brief history of Pokémon in the desert kingdom.
One can also find article ideas on walks. In Brooklyn “Ageless Men’s Health” BRT, I used the closure of a “clinic” in Brooklyn Heights to set up a title pun. My photo of a discarded food delivery bag inspired Dirty Grubhub Delivery Bags in Brooklyn, where I complained about e-bikes in Brooklyn and the sad state of food delivery. The Moon’s Reflection in Downtown Brooklyn and Budding Trees on Red Hook’s Coffey Street are short articles centered on photos I took while walking.
Running a writing website or blog gives rise to its own ideas, although webmasters should be wary of being too self-referential. Dubious School Paper Service Referral was prompted by my finding an unusual referrer in my logs. In My Newsletter Link Saving Workflow, I shared how I collect and annotate links from around the web for my weekly newsletters (I hope you already follow The Newsletter Leaf Journal, which saw issues 222, 223, 224, 225, and 226 mailed in March).
Finally, posts can build on other posts. I have written a number of NBA statistics articles – and one of those articles features prominently in our list of most-visited articles of the month below. Inspired by some of my past research, I reviewed the Worst NBA Playoff Teams By SRS (1984-2024). I had to publish a 95-row chart for this article separately for performance reasons.
I was not too busy on our sister site The Emu Café Social last month. But we can see more blog inspiration techniques in my three new posts. My Haqqani Bounty Payment Hangs By a Thread was a reply to an article I published in 2022, inspired by new breaking news. Things I Learned: 13 U.S. States Ban Ranked-Choice Voting follows from a New Leaf Journal article I published last December. Finally, Trillion Game Two-Part Season Finale was prompted by my looking forward to the end of a very good fall 2024/winter 2025 anime season. There was one more ECS post, but I will save it for the next section.
Most-Turned Leaves of March 2025
I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to count page views (Koko Analytics works entirely locally – you can read my 2022 review, although it has changed a bit while still maintaining the same basic functionality). Each month, I list our most-visited articles according to Koko Analytics. Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of March 2025 and for the three month period covering the first quarter of 2025.
As a threshold matter, our March stats are somewhat distorted by two days of huge “visitor” numbers on the 13th and 19th. As I explained in an ECS post, I am reasonably confident that those numbers were the result of bot traffic being picked up as visitor traffic (I since blocked the bot). Fortunately, the effect of the traffic was adding 1-2 visits to most posts on site, so it did not have any obvious effect on our article ranking. I suspect that without the 13th and 19th, we performed a little bit worse than December–January–February on account of some of our stronger articles from the last three months slacking off, but it was still significantly better than any other 2024 months save for January and February. (It was however our second-best March behind the Hacker News-infused March 2021.)
The top article for the second month running was Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships, which opened up a lead at the start of the month and held it all the way to the finish. The surprising second place was Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria, which performed almost identically to January 2025, but it ranked higher due to less competition at the top in March. There was a point in the second half of the month when it looked like it could challenge for the top spot, but it did not do enough in the final third to close the gap. Our March ranking did not feature too many surprises, but I will single out two for special mention. Hair Color in The Apothecary Diaries Anime continues to perform well as the second season of the anime is ongoing, and it may be a solid prospect for better placements in April and May as a result. Victory Chimes Schooner in Brooklyn Bridge Park, my December 2024 research article on a boat docked in Brooklyn Bridge Park, had a break-through month to debut in our monthly ranking. The boat is still there, so it will be interesting to see whether the best is yet to come. (If you enjoy learning about Victory Chimes, see my related article on its Park Marina neighbor, the Alfred E. Smith.)
Our three-month composite ranking in March is fun since it doubles as a full-year ranking. Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships leads the field by a good margin thanks largely to its huge performance in February, and there is another significant albeit smaller gap between second place Kaori After Story – Visual Novel Review and the Pixelfed duo in third and fourth. While three months is too early to make any definitive proclamations, I would mark the NBA study as the early obvious favorite to lead the year-end ranking, although its performance has been normal good instead of dominant in recent weeks. Kaori had not done much of consequence for two years prior to December 2024, so I am unsure whether we should expect that article to have big weeks during Steam sales for the visual novel in the future. I expect traditional heavy-hitters such as An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search and The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei to rise as the year goes on (I still rate tsuki as a strong year-end top-five prospect despite its middling start). One wild card is Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2. It may receive a surge of views of the upcoming second season receives a definite start date, but some of those views could conceivably go to my review of the first season.
Taking Leaf
April has already begun, and I dare say we have gotten off to a quick start (unlike our very slow start in March). You can follow our April posts in our monthly archive. The New Leaf Journal’s fifth birthday is coming up on April 27, 2025, so I look forward to having plenty to share in our April review next month.
