The Newsletter Leaf Journal LXXXIII 〜 The newsletter laundry co.

Welcome to the 83rd edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal, the official newsletter of the perennially virid growing 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. This newsletter comes packed with links to our seven new articles, recommendations from around the web, and other miscellaneous news and notes. Let's get to it.

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. Notable Leaf Journal
6. News Leaf Journal
7. Taking Leaf

1. Leaves From The Week That Was

For the second consecutive week, the newsletter comes with tidings of seven new New Leaf Journal articles.

One Sentence Article Summaries

• A School Poem By Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr: There was once a time when the elder Oliver Wendell Holmes (writer, poet, physician) was more famous than his son (Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States).
• Squirrel With Walnut at Brooklyn Bridge Park: Back-to-back weeks of squirrel photography content (see last week's post).
• 1923 Ad For The Nonpareil Laundro Co.: I am not sure if this is my shortest all-time article, but it is at least in the running.
• Reviewing the Mastodon Twitter Crossposter: Inspired by the success of a Leaflet on the subject, I wrote a full review.
• Our Town: "Pretty Enough For All Normal Purposes: On one of the best lines from one of the great American plays.
• EnBizCard Review - FOSS Digital Business Cards: I not only reviewed a free and open source (and free of cost) tool for creating digital business cards, I also used it to make a business card (see "News Leaf Journal" section later in the instant newsletter).
• Perspectives From Japan On Watching Movie Credits: A debate that I wrote about from an anecdotal perspective in 2020 (see "Old Leaf Journal" section below) has hit Japanese social media.

Leaflets

I wrote a number of Leaflet microposts over the last week. I will cover a few of those small posts below that will not otherwise appear in the instant newsletter.

• Counting Back From John Adams Birthday: A small follow-up to a longer project that I published on April 29 (see "Most-Turned Leaves Of The Newsletter Week" section) - includes a link to a full article that I published at NAF Musings.
• Happy Mother's Day: Despite having posted Mother's Day content elsewhere throughout the week, I forgot to feature it in last week's newsletter. This micropost corrected the oversight. Also see my look back at a post on Calvin Coolidge writing about his mother.
• Man Uploads 2,000,000 YouTube Videos: And counting...
• A Look at BlogDB: An interesting project that is also featured on our Blogroll.
• Reminding the World of my Art: Still questionable.
• The New Leaf Journal Variety Hour: There was no "topic" of the week.
• Bing vs Yahoo vs DuckDuckGo: I was a bit confused about how Yahoo was out-pacing Bing in our referrals on Wednesday.

2. Leaves From Around The Web

Let's see what's going on around the world wide web...

• Breaking Free of the Gatekeepers of Western Search | Colin Hayhurst for Mojeek | May 12, 2022 | My thoughts: A good post from the CEO of Mojeek, an alternative search engine with an independent index, on the importance of using different search indexes.
• Travel off the beaten path to a secret spot of Japan where bamboo grows wild on an old train line | Oona McGee for SoraNews24 | May 4, 2022 | My thoughts: Beware of mosquitoes.
• NYC DOE falls short of preparing students with reading skills: advocates | Cayla Bamberger for the New York Post | May 2, 2022 | Article Quote (quoting a study): "Many city schools continue to use old curricula that contain ideas and teaching methods that contradict the science" | My thoughts: If more children learned to read in the past, maybe the new "science" is not the solution.
• The giant bowling pins on the top of Japanese buildings often have a hidden second purpose | Casey Baseel for SoraNews24 | May 5, 2022 | My thoughts: The purpose has to do with strikes.
• Twine: Open Source Tool for Making Games with Words, aka Interactive Fiction | John Paul for It's FOSS | February 7, 2022 | My thoughts: I have it installed and on my distant to-do list.
• NVIDIA Transitioning To Official, Open-Source Linux GPU Kernel Driver | Michael Larabel for Phoronix | May 11, 2022 | My thoughts: Some exciting news for Linux. I have been fairly fortunate in not having problems with my NVIDIA GPU save for one unfortunate incident in early 2021.
• Nintendo Says It Wants To Avoid A Repeat Of Wii U With Switch's Successor | Alana Hagues for Nintendo Life | May 10, 2022 | My thoughts: Do I need to update my article praising Nintendo for aspiring to support the Switch for a decade?

3. The Old Leaf Journal

Let's dig into our archives...

• On When to Watch Credits or Leave a Bad Movie | N.A. Ferrell | June 6, 2020 | My original article tackling questions of when to stay for the credits of a movie (or leave early because the movie was bad).
• Seeing Hopkins-Jones II at the Theater | N.A. Ferrell | July 31, 2020 | An article on the last time I stepped foot in a movie theater.
• Previewing Bob Dylan's "False Prophet" | V. Gurbo | May 9, 2020 | Victor V. Gurbo previewed the release of Bob Dylan's 2020 album, Rough and Rowdy Ways

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 May 5-11 was the nineteenth newsletter week of 2022.

Analysis

The surprise of the week was the sudden appearance of my two-week-old article on taking the time that elapsed between a president’s birth and taking office and subtracting that time from the date of the president’s birth. It was the most-viewed article for the last three days of the week, and its still unexplained strength in search engines pushed it to a debut top-five placement at third place. The rise of my presidential survey ended the strange 14-week third-place streak of my review of installing Ubuntu Touch on a Nexus 7 tablet, which dropped to fourth. We also had a change at the very top of the ranking, with my F-Droid app review taking the top spot for the fourth time in 2022, dropping my post on tsuki ga kirei to second by a single page-view (the second time they have been separated by one view in 19 weeks).

5. Notable Leaf Journal

I came across an interesting application called Feather Wiki. Feather Wiki is a single HTML file that runs in your web browser. You download the file from Feather Wiki, open it in a local browser, edit, and then save the new version to your computer. The HTML file can also be hosted on a webserver that serves static-HTML files. Feather Wiki is essentially a lighter version of the more robust TiddlyWiki, and it is easier to save versions of it without any set-up. I have not had much time to try it yet, but I may mark it as a project for The New Leaf Journal down the line.

6. News Leaf Journal

I made a few changes to The New Leaf Journal that visitors should notice.

Firstly, I reorganized our header menu. I created a new Sitemap page that you can use to find all of our site's pages and sub-pages. I then stream-lined and re-ordered our header and footer menus to account for the addition of the Sitemap. See my explanation.

Secondly, I changed the content that displays on the sidebar (desktop) or below articles/archives (mobile). The most recent microposts and most-read content over the previous 3 days will now only appear on our homepage. For all other pages on the site, you will find an easy-to-use navigation menu. I am planning to modify the footer menu outside of our homepage to remove any duplicate content.

In the background, I am working with our caching solution to try to improve The New Leaf Journal's performance when it is hit by search crawlers. I also changed how we serve user profile images to make them smaller and more compressed than they were before.

7. Taking Leaf

Thank you for joining us for another edition of The Newsletter Leaf Journal. If you enjoyed the content and are not already a subscriber, we offer email and RSS sign-up options for our weekly newsletter. Remember that you can also follow The New Leaf Journal via RSS, Atom, or JSON feed.

Until May 21,

Cura ut valeas.