May Intro
While The New Leaf Journal’s birthday falls on April 27, I like to consider May this project’s birthday month. That was part of why most of our sixth birthday celebration this year fell in May. With May now in the books, let us review the month that was at The New Leaf Journal and related projects.
May at The New Leaf Journal
I published 14 new New Leaf Journal articles in May 2026. One of those articles was my April 2026 Review. Let us look at the other new articles from the month.
In celebration of our sixth birthday on April 27, I announced that I would share my blogging “wisdom” in six essays published on May 2, 7, 12, 17, 22, and 27. Remarkably, I managed to publish all six blogging wisdom essays “on time.”
- First, I published Some Benefits of Blogging and Writing Online. As promised, I offered my thoughts on how one can benefit from running a writing website or blog and looking at the world from the perspective of someone who shares what he or she sees and learns.
- In Blogging and the Niche Question, I wrote about whether bloggers should “go niche” so to speak. While I am very much not a niche internet writer (lest I am considered a niche unto myself), I opined that it depends, but one should not make the generalist vs niche decision based on a misplaced desire for internet fame.
- Third, I tackled Blogging Promises, Schedules, and Burnout. While I have never felt “burned out” regarding The New Leaf Journal, I will note that I barely finished this post for its May 12 publication date because I had been writing some heavy work assignments.
- I launched the second half of my blogging wisdom project with The Emu Café and Blog Hospitality. My focus here was offering suggestions to bloggers and internet writers about how they should think about their readers and visitors. This post doubled as a six-year revisiting of Welcome to The Emu Café, which I published on May 16, 2020, as something of a landmark New Leaf Journal essay.
- After mostly avoiding the subject in my first four blogging wisdom articles, I weighed in on Choosing How to Build and Host a Blog. While I do not tell anyone what to use or not use for their blog or writing website (albeit I do have some thoughts on what not to use), I articulated some general principles and equities to consider.
- Finally, I concluded the series with Be the Blogger You Want to Be (Or Read). This final essay was inspired by an external blog post encouraging bloggers and internet writers to write about the things they believe are interesting enough to write about.
While the blogging wisdom project dominated much of my New Leaf Journal time in May, I did publish several articles on other topics.
I published two anecdotal articles. First, in Memories – Recording Mario Kart: Double Dash on VHS, I told the story of how I spent a decent amount of time during one summer break in high school completing and recording a perfect All Cup Tour run in Mario Kart: Double Dash for the Nintendo GameCube. If that was not enough to date me, I submit that I recorded my run on VHS. My final post of May 2026 was Replace Yourself With a Human, Not Bot. This article was inspired by a report about a Baidu employee working to create an AI version of himself before leaving the company. Instead of writing about AI in the work place, I responded with the story of how I found a replacement for me in my high school math class when I had to miss class one day to take an AP exam.
In On Spotify’s SpotifAI Podcasts, I shared that I had learned that Spotify is now in the business of allowing customers (or users?) to generate bespoke AI podcasts based on prompts. I wondered whether Spoify AI could summarize Spotify AI podcasts.
I published three photo posts early in the month. Inflatable Mother’s Day Flowers in Brooklyn comes as advertised, but one year late because I forgot to use this photo in an article before Mother’s Day 2025. In Belleville (NJ) Fire Seen From Red Hook (Brooklyn), I shared my photo smoke rising from Belleville, New Jersey, seen all the way across the river from Red Hook, Brooklyn. In Sliwa for NYC Mayor Lawn Signs Seen in May 2026, I documented and wrote about seeing Curtis Sliwa for Mayor signs left out for garbage pickup in Brooklyn Heights in May 2026, half-a-year after the mayoral election.
Finally, in my technical guide post of the month, I explained how I configured my user profile on The Emu Café Social as the fediverse:creator tag for my New Leaf Journal articles in ActivityPub for WordPress and fediverse:creator.
Speaking of The Emu Café Social…
May at The Emu Café Social
I published 27 new posts on The Emu Café Social in May 2026. You can see the full collection in our May 2026 archive. Most of the posts were my daily Pook-Emu Bee links and link commentary, which you can find in the monthly archive. However, readers may be interested in my special Pook-Emu Bee: Links For Memorial Day (2026) post for an example of what they will find. Below, I will share my non-link posts from May 2026.
- Justice Thomas Moves Into Second: On Clarence Thomas becoming the second longest-serving Supreme Court Justice in U.S. history.
- Writer’s Take on Not Wasting Readers’ Time: Concurring with a take that writers should not tell readers that they do not want to waste readers’ time. Show instead of tell.
- Learning About Preserving Strawberry Freshness: I still haven’t put this advice to the test, however.
- Weighing Large Owls: A useful article if you happen to be in the business of weighing large owls.
- Italy-Azerbaijan Trade Partnership: On learning the identity of Azerbaijan’s largest trade partner.
- Moina Michael and the Remembrance Poppy: A “thing I learned” post for Memorial Day.
- Pink Tea With Baking Soda: I learned about making tea pink with baking soda. That is enough. I do not expect to conduct a taste test.
- Emu Café Social and ATmosphere: Introducing The Emu Café Social’s WordPress plugin-powered Bluesky account.
- Disabling AI in WordPress 7.0: Sharing a tip for how to disable “AI” features in WordPress 7.0+.
- Video: A Defense of Visual Novels: Recommending Zalor’s video A Defense of Visual Novels: What are They and What They Do Well accompanied by some of my selected thoughts.
May at The Newsletter Leaf Journal
I mail The Newsletter Leaf Journal every Saturday (note it can be read online and has an RSS feed). Five Saturdays fell in May (May 2, 9, 16, 23, and 30). I mailed five newsletters.
- Newsletter 278: Weathered letter
- Newsletter 279: Niche bouquet
- Newsletter 280: Virid Burnout
- Newsletter 281: Café Building
- Newsletter 282: Leaf out in May
Every newsletter comes with 21 links from around the web with my link commentary, so they offer something to read even for people who are all caught up on the goings on at The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social.
Most-visited NLJ Articles of May 2026
I use an entirely local, open source, and privacy friendly tool for tracking page visits called Koko Analytics (see my 2022 Koko Analytics review and five-year retrospective). In each month-end review, I list our 24 most-visited articles. Below, you will find our 24 most-visited articles of 2026 next to their cumulative 2026 ranking at the end of May (referring to January-May 2026).
| May Rank | Article (Author. Date of Publication.) | 2026 Rank |
|---|---|---|
| 01 | Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 21, 2026. | 02 |
| 02 | Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 17, 2025. | 01 |
| 03 | How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 11, 2021. | 05 |
| 04 | Amazon “Cargo Bikes” in Brooklyn Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2025. | 03 |
| 05 | Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 5, 2025. | 13 |
| 06 | Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 9, 2024. | 07 |
| 07 | Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023. | 04 |
| 08 | Japanese Environment in PoL, Lutris, and Bottles Nicholas A. Ferrell. June 16, 2022. | 10 |
| 09 | Height differences in anime romances Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 22, 2023. | 11 |
| 10 | Misleading ARRIS Modem Login Instructions Nicholas A. Ferrell. June 12, 2024. | 09 |
| 11 | Usagi Drop: A Complicated Anime Pick Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 19, 2021. | 14 |
| 12 | Umineko When They Cry Red Truth Guide Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 7, 2022. | 17 |
| 13 | Enabling Charging Optimization on GrapheneOS Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 12, 2025. | 23 |
| 14 | Futaba Igarashi’s Hair Is Naturally Green? Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 23, 2021. | 08 |
| 15 | The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 18, 2022. | 06 |
| 16 | Broken Optical Audio Cable Door “Fix” Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 16, 2023. | 16 |
| 17 | Bam Adebayo’s 83 and Scoring Averages in 60+ Point Game Seasons Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 15, 2026. | 79 |
| 18 | Aegis Authenticator and Linux Authenticator Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 8, 2025. | 24 |
| 19 | Honey Lemon Soda – Anime Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 4, 2025. | 18 |
| 20 | Fixing Refresh Rate Issue on 4K TV Monitor Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 26, 2024. | 22 |
| 21 | Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 3, 2023. | 30 |
| 22 | Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki – S2 Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 5, 2024. | 52 |
| 23 | Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 28, 2021. | 19 |
| 24 | Japanese Language Env in Steam (Linux) Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 14, 2023. | 35 |
May 2026 was almost certainly the second-best month in New Leaf Journal history, trailing only August 2022, which featured one of my articles reaching the top three of Hacker News page one. Our two dominant articles of 2026, Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine and Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search, posted their best-ever months.
Back in 2022, May marked the end of the eight-month streak of The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei leading our monthly ranking. One year later, May saw the end of a three-month run by Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage, and 2025 saw May end the three-month run of Examining Whether Defense Wins NBA Championships. Up until the last week of the month, it looked as if Catching 151 Pokémon in Google Search would lead the monthly ranking for a record-extending 10th consecutive month. But was not to be. For reasons I suspect are related to news that Google is now aggressively pushing an “AI” search experience, my Adding noai.duckduckgo.com as Custom Search Engine “exploded” (so to speak) in the last month of May 2026, posting the fifth best month in New Leaf Journal history and the best unassisted month (the four ahead of it all appeared on Hacker News page one) and also leading to DuckDuckGo topping Google in search recorded referrals for the first time ever in the final few days of May (Google was still the largest referrer by a wide margin for the month as a whole).
Some other fun notes from May 2026:
- We have the same top-seven articles in May as in April, but articles 1-2, 3-4, and 6-7 traded places while 5th place Finally Solving My HDMI ARC Problems returned with the same ranking.
- How the Forget-Me-Not Flower Found Its Name finished in a month-end top-three for the first time. It had several 4th-place finishes, including two in March and April of this year, but it had never done better until this month.
- Futaba Igarashi’s Hair Is Naturally Green? finished 14th on the month but moved up one position into 8th place for 2026 thus far. There is enough of a gap between 7 and 8 that I suspect this will be Futaba’s high water mark, but it has been a surprisingly strong year for an article that I published in 2021 and that had never previously finished inside a year-end top 30.
- While no May articles appeared in our month-end top-24, my April 15, 2026 article Bam Adebayo’s 83 and Scoring Averages in 60+ Point Game Seasons slotted in at 17th with enough views to have put it in the top-10 (and in some cases, top-five) in many earlier (especially pre-2026) months.
- Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage, Bottom-tier Character Tomozaki – S2 Review, and Japanese Language Env in Steam (Linux) all made their 2026 top-24 debuts. My Tomozaki review had not previously recorded a month-end top-24.
- The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei finished 25th, making it just the second time it has ended a month outside the top-24. It dropped from 11th to 15th in the year-end ranking, although I would still rate it as a strong candidate to end the year in the top-10.
Taking leaf
I published a relatively timely May 2026 review after having been “late” on my April review. While I have a busy month ahead with non-NLJ matters in June, I have a few out-standing projects that I hope to publish before introducing what promises to be a very patriotic summer season theme here at The New Leaf Journal. I look forward to producing enough articles to make our June 2026 review worth reading.
