September 2024 came to a close. With that, it is time for our regularly scheduled month-in-review. Other than my re-implementing a Guestbook, September was less eventful in terms of site design and behavior changes than August. But it was not uneventful in the area of new articles. Below, I review our new articles and most-visited posts of the month that was.
New New Leaf Journal Articles
I published 22 new articles in September. From outset, let us set aside my August 2024 review and short post on re-implementing our Guestbook, both of which focus more on site news than new ideas. With those set aside, I will break our other 20 new articles into topical categories.
Anime
On September 8, I responded to a query asking for readers to think of a well-liked anime that they did not enjoy. I went through the My Anime List TV anime in search of an answer. Because it took me a while to find a good pick, I discussed numerous popular anime that I do like on my journey.
19 days later, I wrote a full review of Days With My Stepsister, an anime that ran for 12 episodes from June 23 to September 19. Readers may recall that I wrote about aesthetics and hair color in the series in August. I had not originally planned to review Days With My Stepsister, but I figured I might as well after having already written about parts of it.
Photography (sometimes loosely defined)
For 9/11, I published an article centered on a photograph from my May trip to San Antonio, Texas, commemorating the 9/11 Heroes Walk.
One week later, I published a photo of a dramatic mushroom growing from a tree stump in Brooklyn. I was initially stumped about the identity of the mushroom, but a reverse-image search yielded an answer.
On September 23, I told the story of how I rescued an ailanthus webworm moth that had found itself lost in my building. I did not initially know what I had rescued, but after I identified the bug, I collected information about it from around the web.
I decided to end the month with a (literal) bang. On September 14, I saw a fireworks show just over Brooklyn Bridge Park when I was sitting with a friend on the Brooklyn Heights Promenade. I did not expect the fireworks and still do not know what they were for, but I turned it into a photo-post with one lovingly-crafted GIF. I must have been so taken by the fireworks that I almost lost my driving glasses an hour later.
Tech News, Notes, and Random Anecdotes
I read about EA considering adding ads into its AAA games. That reminded me of what EA games were like back in my day in the late 90s, when I was still collecting NBA Live entries for Sega Genesis. This inspired a winding entry for our first article of September.
Two external articles inspired me to address full archive RSS and ATOM feeds, meaning feeds which contain all of a website’s posts. I explained why I do not offer full archive feeds for The New Leaf Journal, notwithstanding that I think the idea may make sense in some cases. I wrote a short companion post on The Emu Café Social.
On September 17, I wrote about the Belarusian government’s suspicions that Pokémon GO is a western spy tool. I may have written this article for the purpose of delivering a pun.
I reviewed a new and small free and open source game for Android, available on F-Droid and GitHub, called Click Switch. My review includes some recommendations for the developer to consider for future versions.
September 26 saw the publication of my post on YouTube’s new pause screen ads. Similarly to the Temu advertising avalanche, I was not familiar with this issue until I read about it. Numerous things struck me about the story, not least how big tech companies try to make their sites as annoying as possible without losing visitors while I steadfastly try to treat my visitors as guests.
Visual Novels
More than two years after publishing my review of May Sky, a 2008 freeware localization of a freeware Japanese visual novel, I finally put together my analysis of the piece. The analysis comes in four parts, covering the novel in order:
In addition to the four analysis articles, I published one piece on the use of dates within May Sky and a second on how the English localization handles Japanese high school class years. Because we now have a significant collection of May Sky articles, I created a new collection post bringing them all together (pun intended). Speaking of all together, back in January I selected May Sky as the best of the 31 al|together visual novel localizations, so it should go without saying that I recommend reading the novel – perhaps with my analysis pieces as a companion.
In my penultimate article of September, I published a review of The Dandelion Girl: Won’t You Remember Me? Like May Sky, Dandelion Girl was written using ONScripter, a free and open source visual novel scripting engine. Unlike May Sky, however, Dandelion Girl is an original English-language visual novel. Some readers may catch that it is based on Robert F. Young’s 1961 science fiction short story, The Dandelion Girl. My review assesses Dandelion Girl in and of itself and in comparison to Young’s original piece. Like May Sky, Dandelion Girl is entirely free of cost, so perhaps my review will inspire some readers to add it to their reading lists.
New Emu Café Social Posts
I run a side-project for short-form posts called The Emu Café Social. You can catch up with my new ECS posts in its September archive.
NEWsletters
I did not fail to publish our Saturday newsletter in September, meaning that we have four new newsletter issues. In addition to covering all the new New Leaf Journal articles that I linked to above, each newsletter includes 21 links from around the web, weekly article rankings, and other news and notes – so there is something to read even if you are fully up to date with The New Leaf Journal and The Emu Café Social. The issues with their full, not-too-serious names, are linked below:
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CXCVIII 〜 Newsletter Live 198
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CXCIX 〜 Perennially underrated
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CC 〜 Glowing edition
- Newsletter Leaf Journal CCI 〜 September snow
A link to the article you are reading will be included in Newsletter 202.
Most-Turned Leaves of September 2024
I use a WordPress plugin called Koko Analytics to count page views (Koko Analytics works entirely locally – you can read my 2021 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 September 2024 and of the three month period from July 1 through September 30.
| Sep Rank | Article (Author. Published On.) | 3-Mo Rank (Change) |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 18, 2022. | 2 (NC) |
| 2 | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021. | 4 (+2) |
| 3 | Broken Optical Audio Cable Door “Fix” Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 16, 2023. | 5 (+6) |
| 4 | Grafting a Bird’s Head Cane Handle Onto a Wooden Umbrella Victor V. Gurbo. June 8, 2021. | 19 (NEW) |
| 5 | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 28, 2021. | 3 (NC) |
| 6 | Planning and Angel Next Door Season 2 Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 5, 2023. | 1 (NC) |
| 7 | Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013) Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 5, 2021. | 6 (-2) |
| 8 | Height differences in anime romances Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 22, 2023. | 9 (+4) |
| 9 | The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 – Statistics and Analysis Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 18, 2022. | 14 (+3) |
| 10 | A Sign of Affection – Anime Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 28, 2024. | 7 (NC) |
| 11 | The Nice Boat: A Look Back at the School Days Anime Nicholas A. Ferrell. May 6, 2021. | 15 (+3) |
| 12 | My Logitech Washable Wired Keyboard K310 Nicholas A. Ferrell. January 20, 2024. | 16 (NEW) |
| 13 | Surviving Megidolaon Spam in Persona 3 FES Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 4, 2023. | X |
| 14 | Installing GrapheneOS on a Google Pixel 6a Nicholas A. Ferrell. May 15, 2023. | 11 (-1) |
| 15 | Dragonair Safari in Pokémon Yellow Nicholas A. Ferrell. October 5, 2023. | 20 (NEW) |
| 16 | Click Switch: FOSS Android Game Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 12, 2024. | X |
| 17 | The Last Nintendo Wii Games Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 1, 2023. | 12 (-3) |
| 18 | Installing LineageOS on a 2013 Nexus 7 (Wi-Fi) Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 28, 2021. | 8 (-3) |
| 19 | Performing Site-Specific Searches With DuckDuckGo Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 8, 2021. | 24 (NEW) |
| 20 | Hair Color in Raven of the Inner Palace Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 15, 2023. | 23 (-3) |
| 21 | Installing Non-Listed Programs in PlayOnLinux Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 8, 2023. | 21 (+1) |
| 22 | Kaori After Story – Visual Novel Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. December 31, 2022. | 22 (-3) |
| 23 | Outline Guide to Persona 3 FES The Answer Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 8, 2024. | X |
| 24 | Reviewing FrogFind: A Search Engine For Vintage Computers Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 24, 2022. | X (23 in Aug) |
| X | Understanding Hair Color in the Kimi ni Todoke Anime Series Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 19, 2021. | 10 (-2) |
| X | Yuki’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 2, 2024. | 13 (-1) |
| X | Itsuomi’s Hair Color in A Sign of Affection Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 5, 2024. | 17 (-3) |
| X | The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten – Anime Review Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 30, 2024. | 18 (-3) |
September followed a similar page-view pattern to August. Our search engine traffic from Google spiked in the second half of August after a slow start that was consistent with May-July. The first half of September saw us revert to our lower numbers before things picked up so much beginning on September 15 that we not only ended up with slightly more page-views than we had in August (despite September being only 30 days), but we came just short of matching 31-day March in terms of total views when we had the most views-per-day since February.
My Norton Safe Search review repeated its first-place finish from August, despite my tsuki ga kirei article taking first place in the final two weekly rankings en route to its best month of 2024 and second monthly runner-up finish. While my specious article on why I reviewed The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten finished outside the top-two for the first time since April, it held on to the top-spot in the three-month ranking for the fourth consecutive month. It is unlikely to make it five in a row, however, unless it has an unexpectedly big October in store for us.
Several articles made their monthly top-four debuts in September. The big surprise is Victor V. Gurbo’s article about a DIY umbrella handle, which came in at fourth place in September based largely on a surge of views early in the month from a source I was never able to identify. My two articles on Persona 3 FES came in at 13th and 23rd, likely inspired by the September 11 release of a remake of FES (note that FES was released stateside in 2008).
I wrote five articles on hair color in the A Sign of Affection anime in February and March. The first two of these articles on the hair color of protagonists Yuki Itose and Itsuomi Nagi led the monthly rankings from February-April, with Yuki notching first place in the three-month ranking in April and May. Both missed the monthly top-24 for the first time since they were published (Yuki was close, however), but my full review of the anime came in a solid 10th place, and will likely break into the 2024 overall top 20 by the end of October.
With the exception of Victor’s umbrella article’s 4th place finish, the articles which made up the September top-24 were not too surprising. It was, on the whole, a solid month, and with some good search engine fortune and article sharing from our readers, perhaps we will have a good first and second half of the month in October like what we saw from November 2023-February 2024 (we are off to a solid start).
Looking Ahead
I have some big article projects in the works for October, so I hope you look forward to them. If you are so inclined, you can stay up to date using our feeds (we offer RSS, ATOM, and JSON feeds), signing up to our newsletter, and/or regularly checking in on our homepage, which always lists our newest articles. I expect to have a good amount to write about in our October month-in-review (at least more than October 2023…).
