The Newsletter Leaf Journal VII (Sep. 20, 2020)
The last week was another busy week for The New Leaf Journal as we continue to publish one article each day, inching closer to completing our September project. Below, I will review each of our articles from the past week and recount two social media stories, one good and one bad, that you will likely see covered on site in the near future.
Content From the Past Week
I began the new week last Sunday with an article about a picture of a red car on Roosevelt Island. I took the picture perhaps an hour before taking the Roosevelt Island tram to Manhattan, which afflicted upon me a severe case of vertigo. But it was a nice picture, subsequent vertigo aside.
On Monday, I published a brief article about my struggle to install the Linux operating system, Peppermint OS, on my formerly Windows 10 laptop. After fighting for a few hours, I was saved by an expert post on the Peppermint OS forum, and now have the operating system up and running on my laptop. Thus far, my impressions from using it have been highly positive, and I look forward to writing a fuller review of my experiences in the next month or so.
On Tuesday, I moved from technology to the law, publishing an article about a peculiar situation in the Sixth Circuit where a district court judge refused to follow a decision from above directing her to re-sentence a gentleman who had downloaded copious amounts of child pornography more harshly. Having to deal with the issue for a second time, the Sixth Circuit again reversed the district court judge and ordered the case to be reassigned on remand in a precedent decision.
On Wednesday, I published an article about a hypothetical device that would “pony-size” a horse. I had written the strange piece many years ago for a prior iteration of “The Emu” project, and being pressed for time that day, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to publish it in the current version of The Emu.
On Thursday, I celebrated Constitution Day with a brief article on the meaning of the phrase “a more perfect union” in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Special thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution for the idea for this article.
On Friday and Saturday, I published two articles based on nineteenth century British magazines. The first article dealt with gardening and royalty, recounting the story of an encounter between Lysander and Cyrus the Younger. We hope to in Cyrus’ beautiful garden, wherein Lysander learned that the impeccably dressed royal before him had not only planned the garden itself but undertaken much of the labor to make those plans a reality. Next, I re-published a piece titled “The Comedy of Life” and tied it to the famous (maybe) last words of the first Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus.
Social Media Story: Bad
In the interest of ending on a high note, let us begin with the bad social media story. Today, I discovered that there is a mysterious Pinterest tracking script on our site homepage: “assets.pinterest.com.” I am still not sure how this script became embedded in our site, for I did not make any substantive changes in recent weeks that would have invited it, but it is having a somewhat negative effect on our homepage loading time. Furthermore, I do not want any third-party tracker scripts on our site, much less from social media services. The script does appear to be linked to Pinterest sharing, so I have deleted all of our social sharing buttons and out-going social links on the homepage for the time being. At the moment, the script appears to only load on our homepage, and not any other pages on site. If you use a Chromium-based web browser (e.g., Chromium, Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, or Opera) or Firefox, I highly recommend installing the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Privacy Badger” extension to block annoying trackers such as this one. I am looking into the situation and hope to figure out how to remove this harmless-but-annoying tracker in the near future.
Social Media Story: Good
Ending on a better note, I recently shared my review on “The Great Suspender” web extension on Twitter. In that post, I noted that I had tested it with the Vivaldi web browser. I expected that post to garner as little interest as nearly all of my Twitter posts, but to my surprise, Tor Odland, the Chief Marketing Officer for Vivaldi, read the post and decided to try the extension. After trying the extension, he found it useful – noting that it added advanced functionality to Vivaldi beyond what Vivaldi has built in, and he said he would keep tinkering with it. Vivaldi’s official account then shared the post and, as a result, the post has been viewed more than 4,000 times thus far, with a very small percentage of those people reading the associated article. Even that small percentage was enough to make Thursday the most-trafficked day at The New Leaf Journal. While that was perhaps an aberration, it stands to show that you never know what kind of content will be most useful. I still use both Vivaldi and The Great Suspender on all three of my computers, and I highly recommend both free products.
Parting Shots
Thank you, as always, for reading The New Leaf Journal. Over the next week, I will work on fixing our tracker/speed issues and continuing to post interesting content each day. We hope to draw more viewers without an assist from the people behind my favorite web browser. If you are reading this post from our newsletter archive, please consider signing up for our newsletter so you can have The Newsletter Leaf Journal delivered to your preferred email inbox every Sunday.
Content From the Past Week
I began the new week last Sunday with an article about a picture of a red car on Roosevelt Island. I took the picture perhaps an hour before taking the Roosevelt Island tram to Manhattan, which afflicted upon me a severe case of vertigo. But it was a nice picture, subsequent vertigo aside.
On Monday, I published a brief article about my struggle to install the Linux operating system, Peppermint OS, on my formerly Windows 10 laptop. After fighting for a few hours, I was saved by an expert post on the Peppermint OS forum, and now have the operating system up and running on my laptop. Thus far, my impressions from using it have been highly positive, and I look forward to writing a fuller review of my experiences in the next month or so.
On Tuesday, I moved from technology to the law, publishing an article about a peculiar situation in the Sixth Circuit where a district court judge refused to follow a decision from above directing her to re-sentence a gentleman who had downloaded copious amounts of child pornography more harshly. Having to deal with the issue for a second time, the Sixth Circuit again reversed the district court judge and ordered the case to be reassigned on remand in a precedent decision.
On Wednesday, I published an article about a hypothetical device that would “pony-size” a horse. I had written the strange piece many years ago for a prior iteration of “The Emu” project, and being pressed for time that day, I thought it was the perfect opportunity to publish it in the current version of The Emu.
On Thursday, I celebrated Constitution Day with a brief article on the meaning of the phrase “a more perfect union” in the Preamble to the U.S. Constitution. Special thanks to the Heritage Foundation’s guide to the Constitution for the idea for this article.
On Friday and Saturday, I published two articles based on nineteenth century British magazines. The first article dealt with gardening and royalty, recounting the story of an encounter between Lysander and Cyrus the Younger. We hope to in Cyrus’ beautiful garden, wherein Lysander learned that the impeccably dressed royal before him had not only planned the garden itself but undertaken much of the labor to make those plans a reality. Next, I re-published a piece titled “The Comedy of Life” and tied it to the famous (maybe) last words of the first Roman Emperor, Caesar Augustus.
Social Media Story: Bad
In the interest of ending on a high note, let us begin with the bad social media story. Today, I discovered that there is a mysterious Pinterest tracking script on our site homepage: “assets.pinterest.com.” I am still not sure how this script became embedded in our site, for I did not make any substantive changes in recent weeks that would have invited it, but it is having a somewhat negative effect on our homepage loading time. Furthermore, I do not want any third-party tracker scripts on our site, much less from social media services. The script does appear to be linked to Pinterest sharing, so I have deleted all of our social sharing buttons and out-going social links on the homepage for the time being. At the moment, the script appears to only load on our homepage, and not any other pages on site. If you use a Chromium-based web browser (e.g., Chromium, Chrome, Vivaldi, Edge, or Opera) or Firefox, I highly recommend installing the Electronic Frontier Foundation’s “Privacy Badger” extension to block annoying trackers such as this one. I am looking into the situation and hope to figure out how to remove this harmless-but-annoying tracker in the near future.
Social Media Story: Good
Ending on a better note, I recently shared my review on “The Great Suspender” web extension on Twitter. In that post, I noted that I had tested it with the Vivaldi web browser. I expected that post to garner as little interest as nearly all of my Twitter posts, but to my surprise, Tor Odland, the Chief Marketing Officer for Vivaldi, read the post and decided to try the extension. After trying the extension, he found it useful – noting that it added advanced functionality to Vivaldi beyond what Vivaldi has built in, and he said he would keep tinkering with it. Vivaldi’s official account then shared the post and, as a result, the post has been viewed more than 4,000 times thus far, with a very small percentage of those people reading the associated article. Even that small percentage was enough to make Thursday the most-trafficked day at The New Leaf Journal. While that was perhaps an aberration, it stands to show that you never know what kind of content will be most useful. I still use both Vivaldi and The Great Suspender on all three of my computers, and I highly recommend both free products.
Parting Shots
Thank you, as always, for reading The New Leaf Journal. Over the next week, I will work on fixing our tracker/speed issues and continuing to post interesting content each day. We hope to draw more viewers without an assist from the people behind my favorite web browser. If you are reading this post from our newsletter archive, please consider signing up for our newsletter so you can have The Newsletter Leaf Journal delivered to your preferred email inbox every Sunday.
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