Discovering the Former “The New Leaf Journal”

Back in 2016-17, I started kicking around ideas for a name and associated domain for what would become this perennially virid online writing magazine, The New Leaf Journal. In so doing, I only checked for the availability of various domain names. One of my ideas was The Emu Café, but .com was taken (that of course would not stop me from taking .org a few years later). I thought of The New Leaf Journal and was surprised to find that both “thenewleafjournal” and “newleafjournal” were available for .com. It had not occurred to me to check if there had previously been a website under either domain. My friend, who was working with us on the project at the time, bought both on her own initiative, so that settled the name quandary. A few years ago, I was looking for an older version of our home page for one reason or another in the Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine. The earliest capture I could find for this site (the home page, at least) was July 1, 2020, which was consistent with our…