Happy Birthday, New Leaf Journal!

I made The New Leaf Journal public on April 27, 2020. Thus, today, April 27, 2026, is The New Leaf Journal’s sixth birthday. With the exception of 2024, I have published a “birthday article” for each of our prior birthdays.

A cup of milky coffee in a clear 12 oz Tervis plastic mug with handle.
I took this photo of my afternoon coffee on July 20, 2025, for a yet-to-be published article.

I published The New Leaf Journal Celebrates Its First Birthday in 2021. In that review, I looked back at each month of that inaugural year of The New Leaf Journal, listed our most-visited articles in those months, and noted key points in the development of the site.

In 2022, I published a Justin and Justina dialogue based on a personal anecdote (from 1996) titled Justin, Justina, and the Eraser’s Birthday.

For our third birthday in 2023, I published New Leaf Journal Third Birthday Reader, wherein I listed our 36 most-visited articles to date and recommended additional, less “popular” articles based on our most “popular” posts.

After skipping 2024 (note: I did celebrate 999 New Leaf Journal articles with 999: The Dialogue on May 24, 2024), I returned in 2025 with 50 Things I Learned in Five Years of NLJ Articles. That followed upon my first annual year-end “things I learned” article.

For our sixth birthday, I am inspired by the December 4, 2024 blog post by Keith Casey titled 20 Years of Blogging and I’m still a n00b. Mr. Casey has been at blogging much longer than I have. When Mr. Casey first started his blog in December 2004, I was wrapping up my first semester of high school, just about half-a-year after I acquired the then-new Harvest Moon: A Wonderful Life for Nintendo GameCube and about a half-a-year before I saw Star Wars: Episode 3 – Revenge of the Sith at the movie theater on a class trip. While I have shared some 2004 anecdotes on The New Leaf Journal, I would not have been capable of starting a blog in 2004. For one, I did not have home internet at the time, and our only computer was an old Windows 95 connected to a a still-working power switcher. I had some familiarity with the internet – see e.g., my article on Game FAQ memories – but I cannot say with the certainty that I was yet familiar with the term “blog.”

In any event, if Mr. Casey was still a “n00b” after 20 years of blogging, then I suppose I must be a “super n00b.” Thus, I will take a page from the book of my blogging senior and follow his article template:

  1. He began by sharing historical stats from his blog.
  2. Next, he shared some wisdom accumulated from 20 years of blogging.

For point one, I will regale you with my vanity writing (I maintain this is an online writing magazine) statistics. For point two, I will share wisdom I have picked up from running The New Leaf Journal. But I will share wisdom with a twist: Readers will find many links and references to relevant articles and blog posts from around the web. If I am a super n00b, then it is both fitting and proper for me to provide references and additional reading.

My “Blogging Statistics”

Today makes it six years for The New Leaf Journal. That is 2,190 days. On The New Leaf Journal itself, I have published 1,244 articles under my name and six under “New Leaf Journal Editors,” so I will give myself 1,250 full articles. According to Jeff Starr’s Simple Blog Stats WordPress plugin, we, which includes 39 articles by Victor V. Gurbo and one article by a contributor, we have published 3,626,334 words here at The New Leaf Journal, for an average of 2,811 per article (that seems high but I will take the plugin’s word for it). While I cannot say exactly how many words came from the 40 articles I did not draft (a fair estimate would be about 45,000), I can say with certainly that I cleared 3,000,000 on my own just in full articles, which is not bad if I do say so myself. Moreover, I served as editor for Victor’s posts, so I played a small role in bringing those to you, the reader.

Not counted in the above word count, I have also published 317 “Leaflet” short posts and 91 “Leaf Buds,” which adds up to 408. I have also published 20 website pages and 9 collection posts.

(I have also mailed 277 editions of The Newsletter Leaf Journal and published 514 times to our sister-site, The Emu Café Social.)

While I have not set the web on fire in terms of popularity, my articles made page one of Hacker News on six occasions and I have collected some interesting backlinks, including links from The New York Times (The Athletic), Der Standard, The XMPP Newsletter, one four Wikipedia references (five if we count the Russian and Finnish editions Wikipedia).

My Blogging Wisdom Project

I had initially planned to condense six years of blogging wisdom, supported by links to other posts full of blogging wisdom from around the web, into one birthday post. However, I was left unsatisfied with my mega-draft. Thus, instead of posting a giant, haphazardly organized article of blogging wisdom that no one would ever make it through, I decided to use this birthday post to start a project.

I will publish six separate articles containing my blogging wisdom on a schedule and add the links below as I publish them. The schedule is as follows:

This schedule works out thematically. I published my first article under my own name on May 2, 2020, and May 27, 2020, was our one-month birthday.

Project Preface

I have not fully decided how my blogging wisdom posts will be organized, but each one will focus on one area of lessons that may be instructive to people who are considering starting a blog (or who may be inspired to by reading my articles) or who already have a blog. Of course, I preface my wisdom by noting that it is colored by my own experiences:

  • I write about what I want to write about it, when I want to write about it. NLJ has no mission statement or manifesto. We do have a slogan: “Where the leaves are perennially virid.” The slogan relates to my commitment writing articles that will be worth the time someone puts into reading them, granting that it is unlikely any single person shares all of my interests.
  • Regardless of the topic, I think of my visitors as my guests and write for my guests, not for machines.
  • While I do share many of my original photographs, NLJ is a writing website with a tilt toward long-form articles and essays.
  • NLJ is a self-hosted WordPress site (WordPress the software, not the service). I handle administrative tasks along with writing articles. As I explained in Blog Questions Challenge Answers, I more or less inherited the WordPress as our CMS of choice.
  • NLJ has no ads, affiliates, sponsors, or subscriptions. I do plan (as I have for a while) to use it to discuss separate projects that may be revenue-generating (my friend and sometimes-author Victor V. Gurbo has discussed his professional music and guitar-building projects), but NLJ itself is free to read and enjoy and free from ads and related annoyances.
  • Because NLJ has no revenue model, I have no direct financial interest in whether people read my articles. However, I have webmaster tools for Google, Bing, and Yandex, and put in a small amount of work to ensure we are in good standing with the search engines and that all of my articles are amenable to indexing. I also pay attention to independent search engines. While I am search friendly, I generally discourage or block AI crawlers.
  • I use a local, privacy-friendly analytics solution for WordPress called Koko Analytics to track page hits. Since July 11, 2020, I have used Koko Analytics for all but three months (I used a similar WordPress solution called Statify for three months in 2025). This tells me roughly how many hits individual articles have and in some cases where those hits came from.
  • I encourage readers to follow NLJ via feed, and I maintain a weekly newsletter in which I share my newest articles along with links from around the web. While I have social media accounts for the site (chief among them Mastodon and Pixelfed), social media is not a major part of my “strategy” and I generally consider Emu Cafe Social to be my “social media” presence.

Taken together, my “wisdom” will most likely be useful (not to presume) to people who either are already running or may be interested in running a personal website, blog, and/or newsletter focused at least in significant part on writing. While my own experience is in the personal and non-commercial space, my emphasis on humane writing and media, that is by human beings, for other human beings, should be applicable to many webmasters, authors, and bloggers with revenue-generating projects (to quote Nicolas Solerieu, “I don’t have anything against people monetizing their thoughts.”). For those of you who do not have websites or blogs, perhaps my “wisdom” will make you consider starting one. I like to think that people who regularly read The New Leaf Journal and other humane writing around the web have interesting things to say. If you are saying interesting things on social media, then I strongly encourage you to consider prioritizing your own website or blog instead (I humbly offer my “wisdom” as a source of ideas).

Because my wisdom will be grounded in my own experiences, I expect to focus primarily on the process of writing and publishing online, and less on technical questions such as which software or platform to use. In the spirit of my The Positive Case for Good Tech, I will focus on what one can gain from writing and publishing online and not on why personal websites are better than things such as centralized social media and AI. I have published many such critiques of bad things on the web, but this project is about giving people ideas for how to publish good things on the web. I will also look at how my thoughts on the benefits of running a good writing website or blog may apply with force to other creative endeavors.

Thank You As Always

If you are reading this, I think you for being a guest of The New Leaf Journal. I have been at it for six years, and I look forward to continuing to publish what I hope are articles of interest to web surfers and improving NLJ and my related projects. I hope readers enjoy my birthday blogging wisdom project and find it inspirational. I suppose it would be altogether fitting and proper for a writing website with a tree aesthetic to help plant new writing websites around the web.

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