The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXXVIII 〜 The newsletterlet stack
Welcome to the 78th 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. Today’s newsletter will come with the usual assortment of new articles from The New Leaf Journal, recommendations from around the web, and site statistics. However, I made some notable changes (improvements, I hope) to the site this week - so I will change the order of parts of the newsletter to cover the new additions to The New Leaf Journal.
Without further ado, let’s get to it.
Table of Contents
- Leaves From The Week That Was
- Introducing Leaflets
- Leaflets From The Week That Was
- Leaves From Around The Web
- The Old Leaf Journal
- Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week
- News Leaf Journal
- Taking Leaf
1. Leaves From The Week That Was
I published five articles since the previous newsletter. However, I will reserve the first of those five articles for the next section of this email - leaving four to cover here.
Margaret E. Sangster’s “A Little Gentleman”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 4, 2022.
I turned to an 1882 issue of Harper’s Young People to re-print a poem by the esteemed Margaret E. Sangster about a very gentlemanly young boy. While I have not conducted a comprehensive survey, it may be the second best children’s poem I have covered at The New Leaf Journal behind only Sydney Grey’s The Blind Girl and the Spring.
Bill’s Secret Garden - A Pokémon Generation 1 Urban Legend
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 6, 2022.
This post had been on my proverbial to-do list since before the launch of The New Leaf Journal. Back in 1998 and 1999, urban legends about the original Pokémon games spread like wildfire due to a variety of factors that I discuss in the article. This post focuses on one particular urban legend and the version of it that I was told in 1999. The article is written both for those who played Pokémon Red and Blue at the time and also for those who do not know any Pokémon besides Pikachu.
On Doves and Pigeons in Brooklyn
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 7, 2022.
Doves and pigeons are closely related, but there are many things to distinguish between these common city birds. But to a small group of sparrows, those differences are immaterial - or so it appeared from a scene I witnessed last year.
Turnip Head: A Work of Open Clip Art
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 9, 2022.
I have begun using Openclipart as a regular image resource for The New Leaf Journal. It provides thousands of public domain images and it has a fairly good internal search engine for discovery purposes. While searching for the dove image that I used in the previous article, I stumbled upon the library of oksmith, an Openclipart librarian who has posted many public domain illustrations from free Japanese image sites. When I saw a certain Turnip Head, I knew that I had an article.
2. Introducing Leaflets
We have a new section at The New Leaf Journal. I introduced it with an article…
Introducing Leaflets Microposts and Activity Stream
Nicholas A. Ferrell. April 3, 2022.
What Are Leaflets?
Leaflets are a new special post type at The New Leaf Journal. I designed them to be microposts. For users of proprietary social media, think of them as somewhere between a Tweet and a Facebook rant. Leaflets do not appear in our regular post archive, but I have added them to our sidebar (they appear on the sidebar on desktop, below the content on mobile). They also have their own RSS feed.
Doves and pigeons are closely related, but there are many things to distinguish between these common city birds. But to a small group of sparrows, those differences are immaterial - or so it appeared from a scene I witnessed last year.
You may be wondering why the archive URL is ends with “leaf” but the individual posts are called leaflets. I would like to convince you that the choice of leaf has to do with the botanical definition of leaflet (see definition 2). (The alternative would be to admit that I had a technical issue and I settled on a clever explanation after the fact.)
I have nothing more to add.
3. Leaflets From The Week That Was
From next week on, I will include leaflet highlights with my general overview of New Leaf Journal posts. However, I will cover them separately this week.
I posted 18 leaflets to get things going. You can see them all here (if you are reading this newsletter well after the fact, go all the way to the last page of the leaflet archive). I will note a few of the leaflets - and omit for now those that touch on issues coming up later in this newsletter.
- Crate and Broken - Furniture Story (April 3, 2022): My TV cabinet has been solid for years, but I found that the bottom drawer had a bit of a design flaw.
- On Dining Sheds in NYC: I received a positive email from a representative of CUEUP about one of my articles noting gross conditions at Brooklyn outdoor dining sheds. The organization is working hard to push the city to wind down the dining shed program, free up sidewalks, and to prevent New York City’s rat problem from becoming worse.
- DT on Odysee vs YouTube (April 5, 2022): Short note on an interesting video by Mr. Derek Taylor (Distro Tube) comparing YouTube and Odysee.
- A Missing Bill Pokémon Urban Legend? (April 6, 2022): Something occurred to me after I finished my Pokémon urban legend article.
- Setting Up Mullvad’s Free Public DNS (April 8, 2022): A link to a guide for using an entirely free privacy-friendly public DNS server that also filters ads. The guide has instructions for Firefox and Android. Consider this the truncated “Notable Leaf Journal” section for the week.
I will discuss a few other leaflets when I get to the changes that I made to The New Leaf Journal over the last week.
4. Leaves From Around The Web
Before discussing The New Leaf Journal more, let’s see what’s happening around the world wide web…
SoraNews24: “A look inside the real sauna installed in a city bus: Sabus”
Master Blaster. March 28, 2022.
I am personally not big on sweating generally, much less communal sweating. For that reason, I have never been, and never will go to, a sauna. Nevertheless, the city bus sauna is novel.
Yahoo! Sports: “Tiger Woods battles his way past the cutline at windy Augusta”
Jay Busbee. April 8, 2022.
Not half-bad 14 months after a catastrophic leg injury and 18 months since his last real tournament. Nine shots off the lead, but only four shots behind second place.
Chris Were: “Chris Were’s recommended apps and websites”
Chris Were.
List.
I discovered Mr. Were’s list on Mastodon. He recommends a number of interesting apps, tools, and resources. Most, but not all, are free and open source.
Kevin Lundberg: “Pokémon Yellow Arbitrary Code Execution Reference”
Kevin Lundberg. December 9, 2018.
I noted in my Pokémon article that the original Pokémon Red and Blue were famous (or notorious) for having many bugs and glitches. Pokémon Yellow, which came to the United States in November 1999, was essentially a deluxe version of Red and Blue with some added mechanics. It ironed out many of the better-known glitches in Red and Blue - but it somehow ended up with more dramatic glitches than the originals, albeit some of Pokémon Yellow’s weirdness requires a deeper understanding of the game’s code than do some of the easy-to-trigger glitches in Red and Blue.
Larry Sanger: “What Is Minifeed and How Can It Help You?”
Larry Sanger. March 22.
I first had the idea of adding a microblog to The New Leaf Journal in early 2021. When I was considering how to do it, I came across a post by Mr. Larry Sanger, one of the founders of Wikipedia (who now holds a negative view of it), on the need for a WordPress microposting plugin. Mr. Sanger has supported the development of a WordPress theme that provides a Twitter-like UI. While the theme is not what I was looking for - I think that it is a good idea. In the article, Mr. Sanger explains how this theme allows anyone to quickly set up a personal microblog and how people can make it easy for friends, family, and the general public to follow.
Hostinger: “How to Create WordPress Custom Post Type - The Ultimate Guide”
Liam Carberry. December 21, 2022.
This is a good guide. I submit our Leaflet custom post type as evidence.
5. The Old Leaf Journal
Let’s take a look at our archives…
A Turnip-Shaped Study of the Word “Napiform”
Nicholas A. Ferrell. August 21, 2022.
My study of the word napiform (the meaning is spoiled by the title of the article) inspired my decision to write this week’s article on the Turnip Head illustration.
The NYC Outdoor Dining Standing Water Crisis
Nicholas A. Ferrell. May 20, 2021.
To be sure, the outdoor dining crisis is not getting better.
6. 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 April 2 to 8 was the fourteenth “Newsletter Week” of 2022. Below, you will find our most-visited articles of the week.
| Rank (LW) | Article | Author | Publish | 22 Top 5 | First |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 (2) | Recommended F-Droid FOSS Apps For Android-Based Devices (2021) | NAF | 11/27/21 | 14 | 3 |
| 2 (1) | The Mystery of Sōseki and Tsuki ga Kirei | NAF | 3/14/21 | 14 | 11 |
| 3 (3) | Installing Ubuntu Touch on an Asus Nexus 7 (2013) | NAF | 7/5/21 | 14 | |
| 4 (9) | The Last Stand of Constantine XI | NAF | 5/30/20 | 5 | |
| 5 (10) | How to Find Substack RSS Feeds and Other Notes | NAF | 6/19/21 | 9 |
Analysis
Newsletter Week 14 was a slight down week, perhaps owed in part to some Google Webmaster page speed findings that defied my comprehension (the issue was resolved today). After losing out on the top spot by one page view last week, my F-Droid app review took its third number one of 2022 by a small margin over my tsuki ga kirei article. Like a rock, my Ubuntu Touch installation article took its usual third-place spot. My Constantine XI article had one of its best weeks of 2022 to comfortably take fourth place. Fifth place was a fair bit back of Constantine, and the relatively low threshold for making the top five may have on some weeks given us an unusual entrant. However, my Substack RSS post held off a crowd to secure its 9th top-five placement in the 14 weeks of 2022.
7. News Leaf Journal
In addition to the leaflet posts, I made several other notable changes to The New Leaf Journal in the last week. I will detail those changes below and discuss some changes that may be in store this month. (If you are reading this newsletter well after the fact, do note that some of the information may be out-of-date, although I think that the first three items on the list will be here to stay for a while).
System Font Stack
Since October 2020, we had been hosting Google Fonts locally. I decided to change our font method. When we were hosting fonts locally, we stored the font on our server and you downloaded it when you visited The New Leaf Journal. Now, I have instructed The New Leaf Journal to use a font that is already installed on your computer. In order to do this, we are using what is “system font stack” - this means that I have listed fonts in order and as soon as one of the fonts matches one on your system, that font will display. I may modify the order of the stack, but it seems to work well so far.
Kindle tablet users may note that Bookerly, the default Kindle font, is part of our stack. I have it installed on my main computer - so that is what I am seeing at the moment (as of the mailing of this newsletter).
Improved Search
WordPress, which powers The New Leaf Journal, is the most-used content management system in the world. It is quite powerful - although not the best tool for every purpose (to be sure, The New Leaf Journal itself would probably make do as a static side if it needed to). One thing that WordPress lacks, however, is a competent search system. The native WordPress search is almost useless. Over the last two years, I have tried a few different search plugins, but none made the search too useful. I decided to give a more intense search plugin a shot. The early returns are promising. Firstly, after my early tests, I have found that searches now return relevant results. Moreover, when you search for a term, you will see the term highlighted in the article excerpts instead of the article’s default excerpt. For example, see the search page for system font.
Quite useful. If you have time and are so inclined, try our new search and see what you think. I should note that you can also search from your address bar in Chromium- or Firefox-based browsers. Add your search query to the end of the following URL: https://thenewleafjournal/com/search/ [your query goes after search/].
New Related Post System
If you have ever scrolled to the bottom of a New Leaf Journal article, you would have noticed that we had a related post section with thumbnails and titles. I decided to change how we handle related posts (we had been using the default widget that came with our theme) for two reasons. Firstly, the theme widget is not easy to configure and I thought that it often returned “related posts” that were not related to the attached article. Secondly, even small thumbnail images are heavy, and I figured that reducing the number of images on pages would speed up the site a bit. For this reason, I replaced our theme’s related post with a more powerful and configurable plugin and I set it to show 9 related posts without thumbnails. It is a definite improvement - be sure to see what it suggests after you finish reading an article.
Between our new related post and search solutions, it should be much easier to find content that interests you.
New Author Box
I had been using the Starbox author box plugin to display our author boxes since the summer of 2020. It is a terrific plugin, but I had two issues with it. Firstly, the avatar image size for the Starbox boxes is different than for our theme’s author boxes - which are used on our author pages. The best solution was to size our author images for the larger theme box, but this meant that the site had to use extra resources to shrink them for Starbox in articles. Secondly, Starbox had some display issues with javascript disabled and with a few of our other settings.
Thus, despite having bought Starbox Pro in 2020, I decided to switch to our theme’s author boxes. While I am not a big fan of their design, I made them a bit more palatable by changing the color with some additional CSS (they’re slowly growing on me). Starbox is still working behind the scenes, however. I am using Starbox to host our author images locally and it adds author meta data to posts.
New Organization
In order to make our homepage and archive smaller, I reduced the number of articles that show at any one time from 9 to 6. To make the sidebar work with our shorter homepage and leaflet posts, I reduced it to three items: Search, Recent Leaflets, and Most Viewed Over 3 Days. I am also streamlining our header menu, but that remains a work in progress (I should have a final plan for that this month).
Pretty Colors
I changed the color of the magnifying glass in our search box and the little arrow that shows up in the bottom of your screen when you scroll down (hitting it takes you to the top of the page).
8. Taking Leaf
That was a long newsletter. To be honest, I hope that I have less to report to you next week in terms of site adjustments and more to report in terms of content and exciting developments in our weekly article top five. Nevertheless, I hope that you like the changes that I am making to The New Leaf Journal, and you should expect a few more tweaks and refinements as our online magazine approaches its second birthday on April 27.
Until next week,
Cura ut valeas.