TsukuBlog

The Alien Times and TsukuBlog websites will be down for scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 27 from 10am to 2pm.

Apologies for the inconvenience.

Write for TsukuBlog

TsukuBlog is a team blog and it benefits from the input of its diverse members. If you are interested in providing useful and entertaining information to the residents of Tsukuba, please contact us to join our team!

Contribute a Picture to TsukuBlog

We have a category called photoblogging that we use when we post pictures that give our readers a sense of what Tsukuba is like. If you have a photo that you would like to share with the Tsukuba community, please contact us.

If you have a large number of photos and you would like to share them all, please upload them to a photo sharing site like Flickr or Picasa Web Albums and then send us the link. We will feature your album in a blog post and add it to our Photo Albums page.

If you are really ambitious, you could provide us with a header photo for the site. The dimensions of the photo should be W=760px, H=175px, but we can crop it to the right size if you are not sure how to do that. Feel free to add a title to the photo (preferably including where in Tsukuba it was taken) and a note to say who took the photo.

Unless we get inundated with photos and can’t keep up with them, we will do our best to post the photos that we receive in a timely way. The editors reserve the right to refuse to post any submitted photos to the blog, but our basic policy is to reflect the spirit of community, so unless there is a very good reason, we will post whatever we get.

We look forward to your contributions!

I have successfully (I hope) moved all of the blog contents over to this new WordPress-powered interface. I also simplified the address of the blog from tsukublog.alientimes.org to blog.alientimes.org. I made links from the old site to the new, so none of your bookmarks will be broken, but it might be a good idea to update them anyway, just in case. And, if you do find any broken links, please let me know.

I also updated the site feed and email notification systems, which are hosted by FeedBurner. I think that I did everything properly, but we will have to wait until tomorrow morning to find out if the email notification is working properly.

There are still a few minor kinks to work out on the new site, but I will get to them in the next little while.

I think this new website is a lot easier to use than the hobbled version of Blogger that we had to work with because we were publishing to our own domain by ftp. The biggest difference that the users will notice is that we can now have a list of the categories used on the site, and we can also offer lists of posts by author, category, month, and title. I hope that our readers find it easier to look for articles of interest now.

If you have any comments about the new site, we would love to hear them!

Tsukublog has been inundated with spam comments in the last couple of days, so I have set it up so all comments will be moderated before they are posted to the blog. This means that if you add a comment to an article, it may take a while for it to show up on the blog. It’s unfortunate that this has to happen, but I guess that is the nature of the internet these days.

Google updated Blogger a while ago, but many of the new features are not available to blogs that are published by ftp (like TsukuBlog). So, if we want to use all of the new Blogger features on this site, we either have to move the blog to BlogSpot or set up a “custom domain” that is still kind of controlled by Google.

I would rather be able to keep some control over the blog (i.e. I want to be able to decide how much space I am able to use for photos, etc.), so I have decided to try to move TsukuBlog to a WordPress-based system.

A Blogger-WordPress import tool was recently developed for the updated version of Blogger, so I think it is time to start working on the changeover. I am not sure how long it will take to move everything over, but I am going to start the process this weekend. If you notice the blog doing weird things, that is why.

I will post again when it looks like the job has been completed.

TsukuBlog is run by Blogger and the Blogger software is currently undergoing some major upgrades. I have switched TsukuBlog to Blogger Beta (we were given the choice, but it was only a matter of time before we would be forced to switch) and that has caused some changes to the blog.

1. All members (contributors) of the blog must sign in with a Google account to post to the blog. (People who read the blog will not be affected.)

2. All of the posts can now be given labels. (See the bottom of this post for the label “tsukublog”. If you click on it, you will be taken to all of the articles labelled with “tsukublog” on this site.)

3. The “feed” and “email service” was a bit strange yesterday because of the upgrade. If you subscribe to the feed or the email updates, you probably received a large number of posts yesterday. I assume that this was due to the upgrade and it shouldn’t happen again. Sorry for the inconvenience.

I am still sorting out some of the details of the migration to Blogger Beta, but so far, everything seems to be in working order. If you notice anything strange, please let me know.

Hi Tsukubloggers,

I would like to ask the bloggers here a favour. I have not yet figured out what the relationship will (eventually) be between Alien Times, Tsukuba Wiki, and this blog. In a perfect world, they would each have a large team of volunteers and a unique purpose or goal in the community. As it stands, they all kind of overlap one another and generally seem to serve similar purposes. I’m all for redundancy, however, since that helps to ensure that people get the information they need, from one source or another.

So, until (or unless) we come up with some sort of master plan for all of these sites, I would like to propose the idea that Tsukublog act as a sort of feeder for Alien Times articles. I want to make sure that the blog posts you write get maximum exposure to the Tsukuba community, and I also want to make sure that the information you provide gets archived in at least two places, so it has a better chance of surviving. To that end, I would like to ask your permission to create Alien Times articles out of some of your posts. I won’t necessarily post all of them on the AT site, but when there are ones that have the potential to help people in the future (like the ones about Sakura and monthly passes, etc.), I would like to be able to post them on the AT website and occasionally have them printed in the paper version.

Any objections? Please let me know what you think in the comments section or by emailing me. (If I don’t hear anything from you within a week or so, I will take your silence as consent — but I would really much rather have your explicit permission.) Of course, if you ever write a post that you would rather *not* see in Alien Times, just let me know and I will honour your wishes. Sound fair?

Hi Fellow Tsukubloggers!

I have finally been able to make some time to archive some of our posts on the Alien Times site. Please have a look at the articles listed in the October issue. I hope to be able to keep AT updated with the archives from this blog on a regular basis.

I would like to know what name to add to the articles by RfFish and Daddy B. I think it is fine to use nicknames on Tsukublog, but if possible, I would like to list proper names (even if they are pseudonyms) on the AT site. I think it makes the information on the AT site more trustworthy to have it signed by “real people”.

Can you guys send me an email to let me know what to do? If you disagree with my reasoning about the AT, feel free to tell me what you think I should do.

Thanks!

I have to apologize for my extended absence from Tsukublogging. Autumn always seems to be a busy time for me, both at work and at play.

We have had some wonderful weather lately. On Saturday, I was able to take a bike ride down Tsukuba RinRin Road thanks to the new (trial) rent-a-cycle service they are providing at the 20km mark. And I took a walk around Expo Memorial Park this afternoon. It was great to see so many people out with their families and friends just enjoying the nice weather.

On Friday I went in to Tokyo for a dinner, but I had some free time before meeting up with my friends, so I decided to go to Meiji Shrine. It is a bit embarrassing to admit this, but I had never been to Meiji Shrine before now even though I have been in Tsukuba for almost 5 years now (and in Japan for longer). I didn’t realize it when I came up with the plan to visit the shrine, but November 3 is the day of the official Meiji Shrine festival. There were all kinds of people there, so it wasn’t very peaceful, but it was really neat to see the 3-, 5-, and 7-year-old children dressed up for shichi-go-san. The kids were extremely cute, and I would have loved to take some pictures of them, but it would have been weird for me to take pictures of other people’s kids! So, here’s a picture of one of the big gates instead…

How did you spend your long weekend?

If you would like to have regular updates on what is happening in Tsukuba, please subscribe to TsukuBlog by filling out the following form.

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Armen from iFFECT.NET posted a message about making the switch from Blogger to WordPress. I moved TsukuBlog from Blogger to WordPress in February 2007, and I am very pleased with the results. I feel like I have a lot more control over the blog now.

I jumped ship shortly after the new Blogger came out because it looked like they were not going to support publishing to your own server (by ftp) to the extent that I wanted them to. The new customizable template system that they introduced was just not compatible with ftp publishing it seems.

In particular, I wanted to make better use of labelling, but it seemed that Blogger was not going to upgrade the labelling system for ftp blogs. I was able to add labels to posts, but I could not put an automated list of them on the side bar. I also couldn’t make the monthly list of past entries expand and contract. The customizations that were made available to blogs that were hosted on BlogSpot or through their “custom domain” setup were not made available to blogs that were published by ftp. Since a lot of content in TsukuBlog stays relevant to the community even after it leaves the front page, I felt that our readers needed a better indexing system than the new Blogger provided to ftp blogs.

I felt strongly that I wanted to continue to host the blog on its own server (as a subdomain of the Alien Times domain), so when it became clear that Google was not going to focus any more energy on developing options for blogs that are published by ftp, I decided it was time for a move to a platform that would give me more options.

Which One Should I Use?

For people who are just setting up a blog and trying to decide whether to use Blogger or WordPress, I would say that they are both good systems, but that there are a few key differences. Blogger is probably easier to use if you do not have a lot of experience making websites. If you don’t care about where the blog is hosted (on your own server or Google’s) and you don’t want to fiddle very much with the basic blog template, then Blogger will probably be fine for your needs.

Blogger
- easier to use than WordPress if you are not familiar with basic techniques for managing websites on your own server
- easily customizable if you host your blog on the Blogspot server or use custom domains
- backed by a large company (Google), so features are robust but sometimes slower to come into existence because they have an obligation to do a lot of testing before launching new features

WordPress
- you will need to be a bit web-savvy to get started (in order to set up the database, for example)
- easily customizable
- backed by a large group of independent developers, so there are lots of interesting customizations available, but they are not always compatible with each other (that said, I haven’t had any compatibility problems with the 11 plugins that I have installed so far)

(Please keep in mind that I am only comparing the versions of Blogger and Wordpress that are hosted on your own server. I am not referring blogs that are hosted on the Blogspot or Wordpress servers.)

One complaint I have with WordPress is that it is a bit of a pain to upgrade to new versions. It is not difficult, but it is fiddly, so I tend to put off upgrading longer than I would like. Other than that, I would say that I am very happy that I made the move from the new Blogger system to WordPress.

The basic difference is that you need to be a wee bit more tech-minded to use WordPress. If you do know a little bit about hosting websites on your own domain, and you think that your blog is going to expand in the future, I would recommend WordPress. If you just want to start typing and you are not really concerned about messing with the guts of your blog, then Blogger is a fine choice.

You can now access TsukuBlog three ways.

1. Come to the website and read the articles online.

2. Subscribe to a “feed”. I have changed the feed to include updates to the Tsukuba Link Collection, so if you are already subscribed to the TsukuBlog feed, you might want to resubscribe with this new link.

3. Have the posts sent to you by email. Clicking on this link will bring you to a page that will let you enter an email address for receiving updates.

Options 2 and 3 are available in the “Subscribe to TsukuBlog” menu on the right side of the blog.

TsukuBlog is currently undergoing maintenance (upgrading the software). The site might act strange for a while. I’ll let you know when things are back to normal.

Upgrade complete. Please let us know if you notice anything strange on the site.

When our readers send in photos or links to their photo albums, we like to use those photos to decorate the blog. In February, we used a photo by Tim Boyle of the plum blossoms on Mt. Tsukuba.

This month, we are using an image provided by Sajid of Mt. Fuji as seen from Tsukuba.

If you have photos or photo albums of Tsukuba that you would like to contribute to the blog, please contact us.

TsukuBlog will not use any email address that is provided to us through any form on this site for purposes other than subscribing that email address to TsukuBlog updates (only if the person requests a subscription) or responding to a comment that has been submitted via email to the site.

We will not disclose your email address to any third party.

If you have any questions, please contact us.

I have put some extra work into TsukuBlog lately. Here are some of the changes.

1. Added a photo album.
2. Added a section that shows the latest 5 links that have been added to the Tsukuba Link Collection
3. Added a section that shows all of the categories of the Tsukuba Link Collection
4. Posted a variety of new articles, such as…

• Quick Choose!
• Recycling Telephone Books
• New Laws about Transfering Money
• Sunday at Tokyo National Museum
• Yukari no Mori

I will also add categories to the blog articles as soon as “team blogs” are allowed to upgrade to Blogger Beta.

I’m not sure if I will be able to keep up this pace, but I’ll try to keep it interesting! (Also, I hope some of our other contributors will post every now and then.) One idea I have is to make a “Tsukuba Kanji Quiz” where we will post photos of signs that you can see around Tsukuba and ask the readers to guess how to read them. Does that sound fun? Are there any other kinds of articles that you want to see? Please let me know!

With your co-operation, I would like to make TsukuBlog a place where you can find fun, informative, and timely information about Tsukuba. My plan is for the articles to be posted continuously during the month and then have relevant ones archived on the Alien Times site and/or Tsukuba Wiki. (If anyone wants to volunteer to update Tsukuba Wiki with the content from Tsukublog once a month, please let me know — or just go ahead and start doing it.)

Subscribe to TsukuBlog

If you have an rss reader (usually built into your browser, or available as an add-on), you can subscribe to Tsukublog and be notified of new articles automatically.

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Related Projects

I have started to collect links to Tsukuba- and Japan-related websites in a “del.icio.us” account for Alien Times.

Tsukuba Link Collection

Subscribe to Tsukuba Link Collection

If you have any suggestions of website links that should be added, please let me know. If you have a del.icio.us account, you can recommend links by tagging them with “for:alientimes”. If you don’t have an account, just send me the links and I will add them manually.

I am working on moving the links from the Alien Times site over to the new account.

I completely missed TsukuBlog’s first anniversary! I have a fairly good excuse (I was travelling around Africa at the time), but perhaps I was the only person who realized that I missed it so it doesn’t matter that much! Anyway, I would like to take this opportunity to share some thoughts about my first year of TsukuBlogging.

TsukuBlog came into existence on July 14, 2006. I started the blog because I wanted to:

1. get information out to the Tsukuba international community faster
2. allow a dialogue with the people in the community (through comments)
3. give people another way to contribute to Alien Times so that I did not have to create as much content myself!

I think that we have succeeded at getting information out to the community faster. Or, at least, a few members of the community are getting the information faster. According to our FeedBurner stats, we have about 70 regular subscribers, with about half of the subscribers receiving the posts by email every morning. I would like that number to increase, but I am not sure how to encourage people to subscribe to the blog without sounding like an infomercial! (Subscribe to TsukuBlog now! It slices! It dices! It will even do your dishes!)

In addition to our regular subscribers, we also get about 1000 visitors per week, so quite a few people are finding the blog. I still think there are more people out there who could benefit from our services, though, so maybe we have to be more pro-active in seeking out links with other Tsukuba- and Japan-related blogs and websites.

When I think back over the past year, I feel like we haven’t received as many comments as I would have liked. However, when I look at the stats (we currently have 395 posts and 222 comments), I suppose we aren’t doing too badly in that department. And since many of our posts are about upcoming events or just information for daily living, I guess I shouldn’t expect a huge number of comments. It’s not like we are writing controversial articles that make people feel like they need to say something back to us.

If comment spam is a sign of popularity, however, we are definitely doing well! Akismet, the plugin that can be used with WordPress to fend off spam, has saved us the hassle of moderating 9361 spam comments! You would think that the spammers would eventually give up, but alas, they are more tenacious than that. If only they would use their powers for the forces of good…

The third goal was to get more people involved as “Tellers of the Tsukuba Story”. In that respect, I think that we have been extremely successful. Some people have contributed a lot (thank you, RRFish!) and some have contributed less, but I am equally grateful to all of our writers for taking the time to blog about their ideas and experiences in Tsukuba. I am always happy to see posts that are written by someone other than me (and I’m sure our readers are too)!

We have a Technorati ranking of 599,844 and our current authority is “12″, which I think means that 12 other blogs have linked to TsukuBlog posts in the past 3 months. I think that our Technorati ranking and authority are not likely to get much higher because our topic (everything you need to know about Tsukuba) is not really relevant to people who are not in Tsukuba (or connected to Tsukuba in some way). I’m sure that if we blogged about something more mainstream, we would be rewarded with higher Technorati stats, so I am not very worried about this indicator of our performance.

One thing that I would like to do is to improve the placement of TsukuBlog and Alien Times for the keyword “Tsukuba” in Google searches. I am not sure why, but Alien Times comes up on the 9th search page for the word “Tsukuba” and I am not even sure where TsukuBlog shows up. However, if you put just about any other word with “Tsukuba”, we show up much higher. I can’t really explain that result. Perhaps we need to start using the word “Tsukuba” in our posts more often so the Google crawler starts associating us more clearly with the city? Not sure.

Overall, I think that the blog is a success. I feel that we are providing a good service to the community and our efforts are appreciated by our readers. Over the next year, I hope that we can increase our subscribers and the number of people who casually view our site so that the information we provide can reach an even wider audience. I am not sure whether there are any particular topics that we should try to focus on over the next year, but I’m sure that if anyone has any ideas, they know how to tell us!

Here’s to another good TsukuBlogging year!

We are upgrading the WordPress software (the software that the blog runs on). The site may act a bit strange for next few minutes. I will post again when things are back to normal.

——————

Update complete. Things should be back to normal. If you notice anything on the site that is not working properly, please let us know!

I don’t know if this will catch on or not, but I wondered if anyone out there might be interested in starting a community blog.

Topics for blogging could include restaurant reviews, sightseeing spots, something interesting you learned about Tsukuba, Japanese language tips (or questions), comments about your life in Tsukuba, announcements of events, recommendations of things to do, etc. Basically anything is okay, as long as it has some (at least remote) connection to Tsukuba and it is not offensive. (And I guess since I am starting up this blog, I get to decide what is offensive.)

Rather than starting with a bunch of rules, I thought I would just invite people to join, and see what happens. (Am I crazy to think that this will work?)

If you are interested in joining in as a blogger, please let me know. I will add you to the blog as a member and you will then be able to post whenever you like.

I think there might be some people out there who are not sure what a blog is, so here is a short explanation.

A blog is a like a journal or a diary that you put online. Blog is an abbreviation of “web log”. If you are interested in contributing to the blog, you can become a member and write some diary entries. Otherwise, you can just visit the site and read what other people have written without becoming a member. You can leave comments about the individual entries by clicking on “comments” on the bottom of each entry. You don’t have to be a member to leave comments.

If you think you will want to write up some entries about your life in Tsukuba, I can make you a member of the blog. Otherwise, if you just want to enjoy reading the entries and maybe make comments sometimes, you can do that without being a member.

Another feature of a blog is that it can be “syndicated”, which means that you can get copies of all entries to the blog sent to a news reader (or, in some cases, your email address). This means that you will be notified of all new entries automatically, so you can keep up with the blog without having to visit the actual site. You can subscribe to TsukuBlog by following the link at the bottom of the page that says “suscribe to this blog”. You will need a news reader to read the entries like this, but your internet browser may already have one built in. If you are not sure, try clicking on the “subscribe to this blog” link and see what happens. (This option will not really be helpful until we get some more entries!)

Here are some links to more information.

More about blogs
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blog

More about subscribing to a blog
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_feed

One person has already joined TsukuBlog as a member (thank you!!) and I am hoping to get at least one or two more. I think it would be particularly good if someone who hasn’t been in Tsukuba for very long joined as a member. Getting the perspective of a newcomer would be great. If you are interested in becoming a member (which means that you are interested in writing entries for the blog), please let me know. (Click on the “Contact us” link on the right.)

If you like the idea of contributing to the blog, but you are not sure how to do it, I will be happy to help you familiarize yourself with the process. You don’t need to know any html or anything. You just have to know how to write. Also, I should mention that it doesn’t matter whether you are a native English speaker or not. As long as we can understand what you are saying, it doesn’t matter whether your English is perfect. It is the message that matters, not the grammar.

If you have any questions, please let me know. I hope you enjoy reading TsukuBlog!

We now have seven people signed up to “Blog for Tsukuba”. That is about five more than I expected, so I am really pleased!

I would like to offer all of our Tsukubloggers encouragement to blog more often. I’m sure it’s really boring for our readers just to read messages from me all the time! Your posts don’t have to be long and they can be on any topic that relates to your life in Tsukuba. I have been posting information about restaurants and events, but you don’t have to follow that pattern. Anything that will help people see Tsukuba from your perspective is welcome. Daddy B’s posts on the Sakura area are wonderful, and I loved Renato’s thoughts on pigeons! I hope to hear from the other contributors soon.

Also, if you wish, you can post a self introduction. It might be interesting to see who we have here… students, researchers, teachers, others?

If possible, I would really like to see at least one post per blogger per week. If that is not possible, then don’t worry about it — it’s just an idea. Your posts can include your thoughts on life in Tsukuba or reports on events or places. My goal is for this site to become a place for people who are (1) thinking of moving to Tsukuba, (2) already in Tsukuba, or (3) back in their home country (or elsewhere) after a stay in Tsukuba to get a sense of what is happening in Tsukuba right now. And I don’t just mean the events, but also the “feeling” in Tsukuba — how Tsukuba’s residents feel about their lives here.

I would like to build up a loyal readership of the blog and get people to think of it as an important Tsukuba resource, on par with Alien Times, Tsukuba Wiki, and the City of Tsukuba website — but even better than those in a certain sense because it is totally “bottom up” and “for the people by the people”.

I hope, too, that people feel free to comment on the blog articles in order to add their perspectives to our contributions. People of Tsukuba have your say!

Too lofty a goal? Perhaps. But you can’t blame me for dreaming!