April 8, 2023

Newsletter Leaf Journal CXXX 〜 Easter Egg cache 〜

Welcome to the 130th 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.

We had a relatively normal week at The New Leaf Journal with a mix of regular articles and short posts. Below, you will find our recap of the week that was at The New Leaf Journal along with links from around the web and other news and notes.

Table of contents

1. Leaves from the week that was
2. Leaves from around the web
3. The Old Leaf Journal
4. Most-turned leaves of the newsletter week
5. News leaf journal
6. Notable leaf journal
7. Taking leaf

Leaves from the week that was

I published four regular articles and six short posts since mailing the previous newsletter.

Regular leaves

• April Fools, Sonic and Tails in SSB Melee (April 1)

  On a whim, and for the third year running, I kept our tradition of an April Fools recap of an old video game magazine April Fools joke. I read the offending issue of Electronic Gaming Monthly when it was fresh off the printing press in 2002, and I use my having been there to put the joke in the context of its time.

• WP Super Cache Preload and Lazy Loading (April 4)

  Identifying an interesting little WordPress-caching plugin issue for the WordPress admins out there.

• Refilling Water Gel Sunscreen Bottle (April 5)

  Easily among my fourteen greatest life accomplishments.

• On whitelisting independent search crawlers (April 6)

  A PSA for webmasters to help enrich our Google-Microsoft-dominated search environment.

Leaflets & Leaf Buds

Now for our short posts…

• Heights in ‘The Dangers of My Heart’ Anime (A new (probably) romance anime with a big height difference (in favor of the girl))
• Website blocked by Google Safe Browsing (While our Bing blacklisting is bad, being flagged by Google Safe Browsing would be far worse)
• Potential WWE-UFC merger and branding (May have to finesse this possible alliance on the UFC side)
• St. Francis College Finalizes Former Campus Sale (An update on a Brooklyn Heights-Downtown Brooklyn story I first covered in March)
• WP Redis Object Cache and Link Hover Color (A twist on our previous caching issues)
• Poor assumptions about NYC subways (Disabusing New York City commuters of the notion that we can have nice things)

Leaves from around the web

I decided to post 12 links from around the web instead of 10 going forward. This is because I save more than 12 links for future newsletters each week, and the list is already growing link..

• Crushed in an earthquake, shattered 15th-century cross restored in time for Easter
  Hannah Brockhaus for Catholic News Agency. April 7, 2023.

  “The cross will be returned to the people of the Archdiocese of Spoleto-Norcia this summer and displayed in the diocesan museum. The reconstruction of the abbey began in September 2022 and will take several years to complete.”

• Rainy day in Kyoto creates amazing photo of sakura above, below, and all around
  Casey Baseel for SoraNews24. April 7, 2023.

  Sakura everywhere.

• Farmers Find Wild African Cat Wandering Around Missouri
  Sarah Kuta for Smithsonian Magazine. February 7, 2023.

  Kitty.

• What Kazuo Oga Thinks About When He Thinks About Backgrounds
  Animation Obsessive. November 21, 2022.

  We learn that one of anime’s great animators prefers cheap paint (we learn many other interesting things too).

• Fred Couples makes history at Masters Saturday when he makes the cut
  Tom D’Angelo for the Palm Beach Post. April 8, 2023.

  At the age of 63 years, six months, and six days, Fred Couples became the oldest player to ever make the cut at golf’s first major, The Masters, passing a record set by Bernhard Langer in 2020 (Mr. Langer may yet have a cut left in him, however). Mr. Couples just missed the cutoff for my 2021 article on oldest players to contend in majors from 1968-2021, but this will do. Also notable: Tiger Woods made his 23rd consecutive cut at The Masters (he missed The Masters in 2014, 2016, and 2017, so the streak dates to 1997 while exempting the three non-appearances), tying a record previously set by Gary Player and… Fred Couples.

• Phoenix’s Delegation to NFL of Power Over Signs Near Super Bowl Violated First Amendment, and was an unconstitutional delegation of government power, an Arizona trial judge held
  Eugene Volokh at The Volokh Conspiracy. February 14, 2023.

  It is more than a bit troubling that one of the largest municipal governments in the United States saw no issue with delegating its authority to the National Football League.

• Could DHS Save Money by Using Ice Bridge Technology in the Dakotas?
  David North for Center for Immigration Studies. February 15, 2023.

  A question about border security at the U.S-Canada border.

• Japanese Museum Wants To Reunite People With Their Lost Game Cartridges
  Alana Hagues for Nintendo Life. February 16, 2023.

  Potentially exciting news if you (A) wrote on your video game cartridges (B) which you no longer have (C) because you lost them or gave them away in Japan.

• What’s Wrong with Bananas
  Norman C. Ellstrand for World’s Sensorium. January 17, 2023.

  The unfortunate ramifications of cloning.

• Corellas and white cockatoos filling skies and sporting fields across Australia is not all bad news
  Gavin McGrath for ABC Australia. February 19, 2023.

  If you are looking for some unambiguously good bird news, you should read about how Victor V. Gurbo and I rescued a pigeon in Brooklyn, New York City.

• Photographer captures image of rare fish that walks on its ‘hands’
  Neil Lewis for CNN. February 20, 2023.

  It better wash those before eating (sing “happy birthday” TWICE).

• Why Musicians Can’t Retire
  Ted Gioia at The Honest Broker. February 19, 2023.

  Fortunately the musician failed retirement meme comes with less potential downside than the boxer failed retirement meme (that’s a segue to the next section…).

The Old Leaf Journal

Let’s dig into our archive…

• On Oscar De La Hoya’s Comeback From Retirement
  N.A. Ferrell. March 30, 2021.

  This poorly-conceived boxing comeback plan never came to fruition on account of Mr. De La Hoya’s coming down with a bad case of a certain virus that was still making the rounds.

• Visual Novel Review - Shooting Star Hill
  N.A. Ferrell. March 3, 2022.

  My review of one of the better visual novels to be translated as part of the al|together project.

• Inflatable Carrot and Easter Bunnies in Brooklyn
  N.A. Ferrell. April 19, 2022.

  I was a touch late on my Easter decoration post last year, but I will not be late this year…

• John Thomas James’ Account of a Cemetery at Tchernigoff in 1813-1814
  N.A. Ferrell. June 25, 2021.

  “The general appearance of piety with which [the graves] are kept up, their sequester situation apart from any town, the profound veneration with which they are saluted by neighbors, added to the dark and sepulchral shade of the old groves…”

• Hatching and Danbo Have a Piano Recital
  N.A. Ferrell. May 1, 2021.

  Still my greatest work of photography.

• Please Ring the Doorbell - A Delivery Story
  Victor V. Gurbo. July 15, 2020.

  Victor V. Gurbo’s plea to the Fed Ex driver.

Most-turned leaves of the 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 of the 14th newsletter week of 2023.

1. Tiki paralogue trick in Fire Emblem Engage
   2023 appearances: 9.
   Top placements: 8.
2. The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
   2023 appearances: 14.
   Top placements: 5.
3. The Pokémon Special Split in Generation 2 - Statistics and Analysis
   2023 appearances: 11.
4. Installing Ubuntu Touch on a Google Nexus 7 (2013)
   2023 appearances: 9.
   Top placements: 1.
5. Peekier Search Engine Review
   2023 appearances: 7.

There were no surprises in our newsletter 14 top five most-visited articles. The top five articles are the five most-read articles of 2023 thus far, albeit slightly out of order. My Fire Emblem Engage essay took the top spot for the eighth week in a row, and while its page view totals are not overwhelming by New Leaf Journal historical standards, none of its eight weeks atop the ranking have been particularly close.

While the last week was a bit underwhelming in terms of total visits as we continue to see the effects of being blacklisted without explanation by Microsoft Bing (and all derivatives thereof, one being the subject of our fifth most-read article of the week), I was encouraged to see that the views were better distributed this week than they had been in recent weeks. One new article, my excessively long review of the recently-finished The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten anime series, took 10th place in the weekly standings, marking it as an article to watch on these lists going forward.

News leaf journal

I slightly changed the display settings in our theme for wide screen displays to fix a text display issue on archive pages. It fixed some, but not all, of the issues (text sometimes runs over the date marker).

I wrote last week that I would look into why The New Leaf Journal site occasionally became unresponsive. After poking around, I determined that the cause may have been how one compression setting I had in our .htaccess file was interacting with our caching plugin. I removed that part of our .htaccess file on Wednesday and have not noticed any downtime since, so I think that the issue is resolved.

See my two caching posts in “leaves from the week that was” for the only other two notable events from the week.

Notable leaf journal

I have been using the Handy Reading feed reader/read-it-later app for Android (available on F-Droid) for a couple of weeks. While it is not perfect, it does just about everything I want from a local feed reading app. That it combines feed reading with read-it-later functionality is a boon to my reading flow. I plan to review it in the somewhat near-future, but I am working out a few minor issues with the app first. One of those was preventing the app from re-fetching previously-read articles from feeds and displaying them as new. I am making progress. You can read my preliminary thoughts at The New Leaf Annex on Bear Blog:

• Handy Reading from F-Droid: Early Impressions
• Tweaking Handy Reading

(I figured that given the Bing situation, I should probably take advantage of the side-blog I set up on Bear Blog.)

Taking leaf

This concludes the 130th issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. Thank you as always for reading. If you enjoyed the content, consider signing up for our Saturday newsletters via email or adding the newsletter’s RSS feed to your favorite feed reader (no “sign-up” required for the RSS option). I also syndicate the newsletter to The New Leaf Journal on Mondays. See all of our options for following the newsletter here.

Until April 14,

Cura ut valeas.