This Halloween marks the last day of October 2022. We have concluded every month since August 2020 with a New Leaf Journal month-in-review post, recapping our content and other news from the month that was. Below, you will find all of our October articles and leaflets neatly organized by category, a list of our most-read content of the month, and some news and notes from October.
October 2022 New Leaf Journal Articles Organized By Category
This is our 25th and final article of October, marking our busiest month since we published 33 articles in May. In addition to our 25 articles, we also published 27 shorter Leaflet posts. Below, I present our 51 October posts (not including this post) organized into topical categories for your reading convenience. You will find that six posts are highlighted. You may consider these my editor’s choice selections for the month (but I encourage you to read all the posts of course, and note the photography posts are short). Because I (N.A. Ferrell) wrote all of the posts, I will only note the dates on which they were published. I will list full articles before Leaflets within categories, regardless of date of publication.
Commentary
- Leaving the Phrase “Reach Out” in the 90s (10/1) Editor’s Choice
- Stadia and the Value of Owning Games (10/4) Editor’s Choice
- Mozilla’s Colorways Gobbledygook (10/19)
- The Worst Elfen Lied-Inuyasha Anime Take (10/24)
- IndieWeb Standards, RSS, and Atom (10/25)
Leaflets
- The Egg Laptop – Aesthetic Design (10/1)
- Attracting Windows Users to Linux (10/1)
- Calling For More IndieWeb in WordPress (10/2)
- A Blog-to-Twitter Service (10/3)
- Don’t Compare Stadia to Dreamcast! (10/4)
- Vivaldi Adds More Features (10/6)
- “Squeegee Men” Become “Squeegee Workers” (10/7)
- Question About Google Translate in China (10/8)
- The Real Issue With Pro Sports Subsidies (10/9)
- My Thoughts on the Meta Quest Pro (10/11)
- Plans for 32-Foot Tall Kiosks in NYC (10/12)
- A TikTok Story Where TikTok Isn’t the Biggest Problem (10/13)
- Re; On McKinsey and Other Consultants (10/15)
Guides
- Wallabag Custom Search Engine Shortcuts (10/6)
- Custom Search Shortcut For Norton Safe Web (10/18)
- Comment on the NLJ with Hypothes.is (10/21)
Leaflets
Halloween Photography
- Existential Crisis of the Rotting Pumpkin (10/17) Editor’s Choice
- Inflatable Minion in Halloween Ghost Costume (10/20)
- A Moldy Halloween Carved Pumpkin (10/27)
- Return of the Happy Halloween Daycare Ghost (10/29)
- Flexible Hose Halloween Snake Creature (10/30)
Photography (Non-Halloween)
- Freedom Tower in the Fog From the Brooklyn Bridge (10/2) Editor’s Choice
- Help! I Think My TV Is Watching Me! (10/3)
- Gulf Stream Boat Sculpture in Brooklyn Bridge Park (10/8)
- Falcon Sighting at Brooklyn Bridge Park (10/9)
- Falcon Photos With Retroboy Camera App (10/9)
- American Beauty Pasta Mural in Brooklyn (10/13) Editor’s Choice
- The Brown Leaf Turtle (10/14)
- Powder Blue Tugboat and Foggy Manhattan Skyline (10/28)
Leaflets
- Wicked Car With Hat Update (10/8)
Reviews
- An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (10/18)
- Return to Shironagasu Island Review (10/31) Editor’s Choice
Leaflets
- Birthday Maker: A Happy Birthday App (10/16)
- Mapquest Search Engine (10/19)
Miscellaneous (all Leaflets)
- Vankyo MatrixPad S7 and Google Play Protect (10/1)
- nice.boats Domain Available For Sale (10/2)
- A Flaw in PayPal’s Email System (10/3)
- Meet the Hummingbird Hawk Moth (10/5)
- Missing Columbus Day For Lack of Planning (10/10)
- Game Boy Operator and the Steam Deck (10/14)
- The Chinese Dragon Gang Origin Story (10/22)
- News I Knew About Being a Mosquito Magnet (10/24)
- Chibi-fying Street Fighter Characters (10/26)
- Losing Track of Steam Library (10/27)
Most-Read Articles of October 2022
We use a privacy-friendly and 100% local WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics (see my review) to count visits to each of our articles and Leaflets. I list our twelve most-visited articles in each month-in-review post. Below, you will find our most-visited articles of October 2022.
| Rank | Article | Author | Published | September Rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | 3.14.21 | 1 |
| 2 | Review of /e/ – An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones | NAF | 11.21.21 | 2 |
| 3 | Ghostwriter Markdown Editor Review | NAF | 10.8.21 | 17 |
| 4 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) | NAF | 7.5.21 | 5 |
| 5 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | 11.27.21 | 4 |
| 6 | Cross-posting from Mastodon to Twitter | NAF | 4.18.22 | 50+ |
| 7 | Review of the Teracube 2e Smartphone | NAF | 11.19.21 | 7 |
| 8 | The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis | NAF | 1.18.22 | 6 |
| 9 | Calvin Coolidge Describes His Mother, Victoria | NAF | 3.13.21 | 50+ |
| 10 | Peekier Search Engine Review | NAF | 2.26.22 | 9 |
| 11 | Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) | NAF | 11.15.20 | 22 |
| 12 | Reviewing the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter | NAF | 5.10.22 | 50+ |
October proved to be our most competitive month for making the top-12, with our highest-ever finishing 12th place article in terms of page views (surpassing July 2022). Five of the top-12 articles finished outside of September’s top-12, and three of those five articles finished outside of September’s top-50. Two of the big jumpers, my Leaflet post and full article on the Mastodon-Twitter Crossposter, saw a surge in views after Mr. Elon Musk completed his purchase of Twitter.
The last-minute gains of the two Mastodon-Twitter posts caused my 2020 article on Constantine XI’s last stand to miss the top-12 for the first time since I have been tracking monthly top-12s in January 2021. It narrowly missed the final spot, coming in 13th place. With Constantine XI’s streak broken, my tsuki ga kirei post, which topped the ranking this month, now has the longest streak of monthly top-12s at 18, followed by my July 2021 Ubuntu Touch install review at 16. The second article which missed out (coming in right behind Constantine XI at 14th) is my 2022 post on configuring a Japanese runtime environment in PlayOnLinux, Lutris, and Bottles. It would have made its first monthly top-12 had Mr. Musk waited just a bit longer to take over Twitter.
The sudden appearance in 9th place of my article on Calvin Coolidge’s description of his mother warms my heart, but it is unexpected in that this article never previously came close to a monthly top-12 in its first 17 full months on site (I am not sure what caused the sudden interest). The other notable event of the month was the strong finish of my October 2021 Ghostwriter markdown editor review. It had appeared in two previous monthly top-12s, most recently in January 2022, but October 2022 marked its best month in terms of page views by a wide margin.
At the top of the ranking, my tsuki ga kirei post narrowly held on to the top spot over my 2021 /e/ OS review for the second consecutive month in what was again one of the closest races for the top spot. However, while my /e/ OS post nearly took the top spot in a last-minute surge in September, it led our October ranking continuously until October 28 before being over-taken by my tsuki ga kirei review.
Using Hypothes.is to Comment on The New Leaf Journal
In one of my new articles, I explained how you can use the Hypothes.is annotation service (fully free and open source and free of cost) to comment on The New Leaf Journal. You can learn how here and you can also follow a feed of my non-New Leaf Journal annotations.
Looking Ahead to November
Many of our most-read articles were published in November 2020 and 2021. As of October 31, 2022, seven of our 50 most-read articles of 2022 (and five of the top 25) were published in November 2020 or 2021 (list in alphabetical order):
- Abraham Lincoln’s 1851 Letters on Work to John D. Johnston [11.4.21]
- An Early Review of Pixelfed – Instagram Alternative [11.13.20]
- Persona 4 Golden Digital Artbook Review (Steam) [11.15.20]
- Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) [11.27.21]
- Review of /e/ – An Android Alternative For Mobile Phones [11.21.21]
- Review of the Teracube 2e Smartphone [11.19.21]
- The Story of Billy Possum, President Hoover’s Pet Opossum [11.30.21]
November has been a good month for publishing content that people actually read. I look forward to continuing our trend of publishing popular (by our standards, at least) content this November. I struggled a bit in October because of work (this partially explains the large number of photo posts) and I only published some of what I had left over from September. For November, I look forward to (I hope) having time to work on some longer projects that I had on the back-burner and coming up with some new ideas as the month progresses. Moreover, we had surprise presidential articles make our previous two top-12s after having had no prior appearances (see my piece on 1851 letters by Abraham Lincoln, which finished 3rd in September). Could November 2021 be a big month for my article on Calvin Coolidge’s Thanksgiving pet racoon or George Washington’s 1789 Thanksgiving Proclamation? My fingers are crossed.