September 16, 2023

Newsletter Leaf Journal CLIII 〜 No-smoking newsletter 〜

The 153rd Newsletter Leaf Journal includes the newest New Leaf Journal articles, notes about a recent technical issue, and a look ahead to autumn at our perennially virid online writing magazine.

Welcome to the 153rd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. This newsletter comes to you as always from the waterproof keyboard of the editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell. It was not a big publishing week at The New Leaf Journal, but I produced a few articles while also continuing to work on improving the site and its sister project, The Emu Café Social. Let us begin our week-in-review.

Leaves from the week that was

I technically published three new articles, but one was about our cache system serving some visitors a compressed page to download instead of the normal web page for 12 hours on Thursday. Technical issue update aside, my two full articles were fairly long.

• Middle school restroom smoking (Settle in for a story of a one-time incident in my middle school that resurfaced in an unexpected way when I was in high school)
• The Girl I Like Forgot Her Glasses hair dye (You can glean from the cumbersome title that we have a new update in our ongoing series on anime hair color)

I also published a Leaf Bud micropost on a dumb New York Post headline. Note that my Leaflets and Leaf Buds are on a brief hiatus while I figure out how to best display them in light of our site formatting changes. Over at The Emu Café Social, which is still a work in progress, I published short posts on pears in the wild in Brooklyn and a Tom Cantor book sighting.

Leaves from around the web

Let us check in around the world wide web...

• Teen shatters window of sweltering hot car to save little girl banging on the window
  Brad Matthews for The Washington Times. September 9, 2023.

  Good for the hero in this situation, Mr. Alex Torres. Bad on the negligent parents who put Mr. Torres in the position of having to be a hero.

• You'll Need a Microscope to See These Miniature Masterpieces
  Julia Binswanger for Smithsonian Magazine. April 6, 2023.

  Definitely not sharing this one because it provides me with a theme for this week's Old Leaf Journal section (see next newsletter section).

• Rural Americans are importing tiny Japanese pickup trucks
  The Economist. April 23, 2023.

  They are fun-sized.

• Azerbaijan to host Formula 1 for another three years
  Eurasianet. May 5, 2023.

  "But economists and Baku residents have for years been questioning the efficacy of hosting the races. It seems to have brought little benefit while periodically disrupting traffic in the capital and compelling pedestrians to walk amid fenced streets has been its only tangible effect." (At least it is not a hideous stadium that will haunt Baku forever.)

• Food Innovations That Came from War
  Diana Hubbell for Atlas Obscura. May 12, 2023.

  As advertised.

• How to Feed an Army
  Diana Hubbell for Atlas Obscura. May 12, 2023.

  A look inside the U.S. Military's research and development lab for battlefield food.

• Japan Railways selling official gloves, cushion, timetable, and more for official sim game
  Master Blaster for SoraNews24. July 18, 2023.

  You're not really playing a train simulator until you have the chair pad and gloves.

• Steal a march
  Grammarphobia. July 24, 2023.

  The anatomy of the phrase "steal a march."

• Adobe Antitrust Concerns: Is the Photoshop-Maker Too Big?
  Ernie Smith at Tedium. March 12, 2019.

  If you have to ask...

The Old Leaf Journal

Now for our own archives...

• A Miniature Portrait of Laura Coombs Hills
  N.A. Ferrell. January 15, 2021.

  Learn about one of America's most decorated miniature painters.

• The Story Behind a Miniature Painting of Abraham Lincoln
  N.A. Ferrell. April 6, 2021.

  For whatever it is worth, I think this article is more interesting than my far more successful Lincoln post.

• Reverend Warneford’s 1890s Miniature Model Railroad System in Windsor
  N.A. Ferrell. June 5, 2021.

  A personal (choo choo) favorite.

• History of Thanksgiving Proclamations in the Philippines
  N.A. Ferrell. November 23, 2022.

  One may think on first glance that September is not the right time to share my history of Thanksgiving in the Philippines. However, it is timely with respect to a particular unfortunate chapter of Thanksgiving in the Philippines.

• Lysander and Cyrus the Younger's Garden
  N.A. Ferrell. September 18, 2020.

  "You are truly happy, and deserve your high fortune, since you united it with virtue."

• Kaga no Chiyo Autumn Haiku on Unrequited Love
  N.A. Ferrell. December 14, 2020.

  "No autumn colors tint that side of the mountain: a one-sided love."

Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week

I list our most-read articles from the previous newsletter week (Friday to Saturday) in each edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. These statistics come courtesy of Koko Analytics, our local, privacy friendly page-counting solution (see my review). Below, I present the 5 most-visited articles for 2023 newsletter week 37. (Note: All stats are for 2023 only.)

1. Height differences in anime romances (NAF; 3.22.23)
   12 appearances. 6 top placements.
2. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 - Statistics and Analysis (NAF; 1.18.22)
   28 appearances. 1 top placement.
3. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei (NAF; 3.14.21)
   36 appearances. 12 top placements.
4. An In-Depth Look at Norton Safe Search (NAF; 10.18.22)
   3 appearances.
5. Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage (NAF; 2.3.23)
   26 appearances. 11 top placements.

We had a somewhat underwhelming week in page views punctuated by losing half-a-day of visits due to a technical error on Thursday. That technical error may have been the difference at the top of the ranking, where my Pokémon stats article came just short of overcoming an early week deficit against my anime height essay, but we will never know. There were no major surprises in terms of the five articles that placed in the top five this week as we inch closer to the conclusion of the third quarter of 2023.

News leaf journal

As I noted above, our caching system caused some visitors on Thursday, roughly between midnight and noon, to be invited to download a gzipped file of a requested page in lieu of visiting the page. We had this issue for a brief period in January for a different reason. I am not sure what precisely triggered it on Thursday, but I opted to disable gzip compression in our caching settings. In light of the fact that our site is already light and I optimize media before uploading, I do not think it makes a significant difference (my page speed tests showed no difference at all).

I made a few additional aesthetic changes to the site. You will notice that our two search boxes (one on mobile) look a bit different now. I also temporarily removed our footer menu and I plan to re-design it and the header menu this week. I am also still planning to add categories and tags to our short-format Leaflets and Leaf Buds while reassessing their purpose going forward now that I also have The Emu Café Social for short-form posts, but that project is not likely to be done this week.

(I also need to syndicate the last two newsletters...)

Notable Leaf Journal

One reason our technical issue persisted for as long as it did on Thursday was because I lost internet for some unknown reason late on Thursday night, and the outage persisted until the next morning. I do all of my New Leaf Journal editing on my desktop workstation, so I did not become aware of the issue until internet returned and I checked in to the site to see that Koko Analytics had only picked up a small number of pageviews -- small enough to tip me off that something had gone sideways. I confirmed the issue when I tried to visit our home page while not logged in to the site. I resolved the issue by clearing our cache and unchecking the option to compress pages. I may look into why our page compression system failed this time, but as I noted, I do not think it is worth the trouble given the fact that it does not significantly change site performance with our set-up.

Taking leaf

Thank you as always for reading and following The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and have not done so already, you can sign up to receive our weekly newsletter via email or add our newsletter's RSS feed to your favorite reader. I also syndicate the newsletter to The New Leaf Journal, although I am falling behind on that project at the moment. See our sign-up options here. You can also follow The New Leaf Journal via feed.

I have a few more tweaks to the site in store and some interesting articles in the works, so I hope you look forward to them as we move into the latter half of September.

Until autumn and September 23,
Cura ut valeas.