The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXX 〜 It's still *technically* Saturday
Welcome to the 70th edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. As always, this newsletter comes to you from the waterproof keyboard of the administrator and editor of The New Leaf Journal, Nicholas A. Ferrell.
70 is a nice-round milestone number for The Newsletter Leaf Journal. However, The New Leaf Journal achieved a more notable milestone with my publication of its 500th article earlier in the week. In addition to that big milestone, I published several new articles and made some changes to the site as we settle into our new powerful hosting environment.
Below, you will find our usual assortment of news about The New Leaf Journal and content and recommendations from around the web.
Table of Contents
- Leaves From The Week That Was
- Leaves From Around The Web
- The Old Leaf Journal
- Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
- Notable Leaf Journal
- News Leaf Journal
- Taking Leaf
1. Leaves From The Week That Was
I returned to a normal publishing schedule last week with six new articles - albeit the first of the six was a reprinting of last week’s newsletter. Because I was bogged down with work for my day job and work on the site, our new articles were largely short-to-medium length, but I did cover a good amount of ground.
“The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXIX 〜 The Move(d) Leaf Journal”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 5, 2022.
For only the second time, I reprinted an issue of The Newsletter Leaf Journal in The New Leaf Journal. Since I had spent last Saturday completing the move of our humble online magazine from Bluehost to Hetzner Cloud, I did not have enough time left in the day to discuss the move in two separate places. Thus, I pushed the newsletter and adapted it to the main site.
“The Serene Man With The Hose”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 6, 2022.
A few days after our great caching crisis of June 2020, I published a philosophical article on the-man-with-the-hose. For my first post on our new home, I published a long-awaited follow-up.
“The Nintendo Switch and Long-Lasting Tech”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 8, 2022.
Inspired by a suggestion from Nintendo that the Nintendo Switch, which was released in 2016, is only half-way through its life-cycle, I published a post making the case that improvements in technology should produce flagship game consoles and other tech products that are supported for 10 years or more.
“On Facebook’s Threat (Or Promise?) To Leave Europe”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 10, 2022.
Our 500th article was my specious take on a cryptic statement from Facebook that could be interpreted as a threat to leave the European Union if the EU passes regulations regarding data storage with which Facebook disagrees. For the record, I am fully aware that Facebook is not actually leaving Europe - but its statement made for some amusing content.
“New Leaf Milestone: 500 Articles”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 10, 2022.
I celebrated our 500th article by featuring 10 articles that I think are among our best but that did not receive much attention from visitors. Because this was a milestone celebration, I broke the 500 articles into 10 blocks of 50 and chose one article from each block to feature in this article.
“‘Love is Free Not cheap’ Fridge Graffiti in Brooklyn”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 11, 2022.
I had a photo of “Love is Free Not cheap” graffiti in my unused content archive since December. In need of a short post with Valentine’s Day approaching, I decided to finally move the article off of my to-do list.
2. Leaves From Around The Web
Below, you will find six articles from around the web.
Catholic News Agency: “St. Valentine: How a beheaded martyr became the poster child for romantic love”
CNA Staff. February 6, 2022.
An interesting and timely history.
New York Post: “NYC protesters rally in Greenwich Village against outdoor dining sheds”
Griffin Kelly and Melissa Klein.
Let’s check in on Greenwich Village…
“The protesters, carrying signs that read ‘Open Restaurants Trash Our Streets’‘ passed by dozens of huts on MacDougal and Bleecker Streets — some occupied by diners brunching on a freezing cold afternoon where temps hovered in the 20s.”
I’m with them in spirit. May I add standing water to the list of problems?
SoraNews24: “Tokyo hot spring allows guests with tattoos to bathe… with some very odd restrictions”
Scott Wilson. February 6, 2022.
Let’s see what is going on with open baths in Japan…
“As the Japan Tourism Agency is relaxing its polices, Thermae Yu is initiating an experimental policy of allowing entry to female guests with fashion tattoos.”
I was not aware of rules regarding tattoos in public baths in Japan, but this article provides a good primer along with the news about slight rule changes.
The Washington Times: “Prime minister grooms West Point-educated son to take over in Cambodia”
Richard S. Ehrlich. February 7, 2022.
Somewhere, a man or woman who applied to West Point with impeccable credentials in 1999 reads this headline with some degree of confusion. But that issue aside, the article provides an interesting look at the political situation in Cambodia.
Nintendo Life: “Did You Know The Game Boy Advance Could Make Video Calls In 2004?”
Damien McFerran. February 11, 2022.
I did not know this, and that I did not know this should come as no surprise in light of the fact that the long-forgotten peripheral that allowed for “video calls” was expensive, created in limited quantities, and released only in Japan.
“Straight 2 Spam”
Let’s check out this new service…
“Love emails but hate people? Don’t want someone 🤡 at your party 🥳 but have to invite them 🤢 cause your mom 💁♀️ made you? Trust Straight 2 Spam to send your v important email 📧 straight to their spam 🗑?”
Copied from the website. As it suggests, this allows you to send an email to someone that will be marked as spam - provided that you’re not already in the recipient’s address book.
3. The Old Leaf Journal
It was not easy choosing only ten unsung articles to feature in my 500 articles post. Here, I will post two that just missed the cut.
“The Longest Year of School Finally Ends”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. September 26, 2020.
I published this short post just after watching the end of the Oregairu anime series. The inspiration for the post was a quote from the author of the underlying novels about finishing his project after ten years of work. He stated that after finishing, he felt like he could finally close the book on his own time in high school. An interesting sentiment that transcended the author’s work.
“Around the Web 〜 Hair Dye in Japanese Schools”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. February 7, 2021.
This was the first post of my now-dormant around the web series that I published during the first half of 2021. It covered a controversy involving a Japanese school student with naturally brown hair being forced to dye her hair black. While this article focused on real issues, it led to a series of articles on hair color in anime. Three of those five articles were not eligible for inclusion in my 500th article special because they featured in the top-50 most-read articles of 2021 (do readers prefer 2D person hair color stories?).
4. Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
I list our most-visited articles of the previous week in each newsletter. In keeping with our newsletter schedule, these “Newsletter Weeks” begin with Saturday and end on Friday. The statistics come courtesy of our local and privacy-friendly analytics solution, Koko Analytics - which I reviewed on site.
The week of February 5-11 was the sixth Newsletter Week of 2022. Below, you will find our five most-read articles of newsletter week 2022 along with relevant statistics and my analysis.
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The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei
Nicholas A. Ferrell. March 14, 2021.
Last Week: #1
2022 Top Fives: 6 (6 in first).
Notes: 23 consecutive weeks at #1. -
Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021).
Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 27, 2021.
Last Week: #2.
2022 Top Fives: 6. -
Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013)
Nicholas A. Ferrell. July 5, 2021.
Last Week: #3.
2022 Top Fives: 6. -
How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes.
Nicholas A. Ferrell. June 19, 2021.
Last Week: #4.
2022 Top Fives: 6. -
An Early Review of Pixelfed - Instagram Alternative.
Nicholas A. Ferrell. November 13, 2020.
Last Week: 22
2022 Top Fives: First 2022 Appearance
Analysis
While we did not return to our early-January view levels, our first week settling into our new hosting was better than our last two weeks on Bluehost in terms of traffic. But while the site still slacks a bit, my post on the phrase “tsuki ga kirei” had its best week in 2022 and best week overall since November, easily capturing the top spot on the ranking for the 23rd consecutive week.
The only change in our ranking was my 2020 Pixelfed review returning to the top-five for the first time in a couple of months, and in so doing becoming the seventh article to make a weekly top five in 2022.
5. Notable Leaf Journal
Today I recommend the best adblocking extension for Chrome and Firefox, uBlock Origin. I chose uBlock this week because it just received a new release and featured on the first page of Hacker News.
I will likely cover uBlock Origin in detail in a future New Leaf Journal post, so I will offer only a shorter summary here.
How does uBlock Origin block ads? uBlock Origin uses ad and tracker filter lists to block certain domains from connecting. One thing that makes uBlock Origin special is that users can not only choose which filter lists to enable and disable, but also can add their own filter lists. uBlock comes out of the box preconfigured with a good selection of filters that will greatly improve one’s browsing experience, but these can be toggled on and off (I chose my own set of filters based on my own preferences and to work with what my host blocker already accomplishes.
uBlock Origin comes with numerous advanced features beyond its basic adblocking. I personally use a strict version of its script-blocking functionality, which allows me to choose which scripts I want to allow to run on a domain-by-domain basis. It also features cosmetic filtering to rid webpages of undesirable elements.
I strongly recommend installing uBlock Origin if you use a Chromium- or Firefox-based web browser. You can find links to its extension store pages on GitHub and learn about its advanced features on the uBlock Origin Wiki.
uBlock Origin is fully free and open source and the developer, Mr. Raymond Hill, refuses to accept donations, much less other forms of remuneration (he recommends that users donate to the maintainers of the block-lists instead).
Final note: uBlock and uBlock Origin are not the same. If you want to try this, use uBlock Origin.
6. News Leaf Journal
The New Leaf Journal has been running swimmingly on Hetzner Cloud. However, the smooth transition did not mean my work was done. I made some significant changes to The New Leaf Journal - some visible and others not.
- I changed our theme layout a bit. We now display nine articles instead of six on our homepage and in archive pages. I reduced the sidebar content to only show the most-read articles (homepage) and most-recent articles (all other pages). I do have one idea for an addition to the sidebar that I may test out this month.
- I reorganized the header and footer menus to make them more logical.
- I switched from using Yoast SEO as our SEO plugin solution to The SEO Framework. The transition was smooth and has provided a mild benefit to our site performance (SEO Framework is quite a bit lighter than Yoast). I am still making some adjustments with SEO Framework’s tools to improve our search standing.
- I added WebP functionality for how we serve images - although I am not entirely clear on how it works for most users.
- After learning that our social share buttons had some display issues, I removed them entirely.
- I changed how we handle Lazy Loading when I discovered that our previous solution created display problems for users who do not enable JavaScript.
- Moved our search bar to the footer.
- Although this is not a site-related change per se, I changed our official email provider from Zoho Mail to Purelymail.
The SEO Framework added a new page to The New Leaf Journal family. Meet our aesthetic sitemap, an automatically generated list of articles and pages that can be indexed by search engines. While the sitemap is primarily for search engines, regular users can also use it to find content.
In the short term, I am working on configuring The New Leaf Journal to send clerical emails to me. This would resolve a meaningless error message that people posting on our Contact Form will see (regardless of the error, I do receive Contact Form posts).
In the slightly longer term, I am studying implementing a forum to replace our now-defunct Guestbook, the kind of thing that is only possible with more server resources, but I have not made a final decision on when or how I will do this. Further down the line, I will make some bigger changes to the site theme.
One change I considered when thinking about new hosting but decided to pass on regards analytics. My server dashboard includes several easy-to-install self-hosted analytics solutions with more robust functionality than Koko Analytics. However, I decided that Koko Analytics remains the best solution for The New Leaf Journal.
7. Conclusion
Thank you as always for reading The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content, consider signing up to follow our weekly newsletter . We provide email and RSS options.
I have some interesting content planned for the next week - so I hope that you check in on The New Leaf Journal and look forward to our next newsletter.
Until next week,
Cura ut valeas.