Alien Times Fundraising Week 2008
Sunday, November 30, 2008
to
Saturday, December 6, 2008
November 30 commemorates the day in 1987 that the City of Tsukuba was born from the Village of Sakura and the Towns of Yatabe, Toyosato, and Oho. (The Town of Tsukuba merged with the rest on January 31 of the following year). Since Alien Times was also born in 1987, the Alien Times staff have chosen November 30 and the week that follows it to be ALIEN TIMES FUNDRAISING WEEK.
If you would like to donate to support the publication of Tsukuba's Original English Newsletter which has been published for and by the foreign community of Tsukuba since 1987, please choose one of the following options. You can choose the amount that you would like to donate. (As a guideline, if 20 people donate 2500 yen, we will be able to meet our target. But any amount is welcome!)
PayPal or Credit Card
Click to Donate via PayPal or Credit Card.
Furikomi
Bank: Joyo Bank (常陽銀行)
Branch: Kenkyu Gakuen Toshi Shiten (研究学園都市支店)
Account Name: THE ALIEN TIMES
Account No: 7259017 (regular account, 普通)
Cash Envelope by Mail (Genkin Kakitome)
Address: 305-0051 Ibaraki-ken, Tsukuba-shi, Ninomiya 1-6-2
Ninomiya House
Alien Times Post Box
Cash to AT Staff
If you meet up with one of the AT Editors (Mieko Ono, Shaney Crawford, Anna Hamakoji), you can hand your donation to us and we will be sure to put it directly into the bank account. (If you are not comfortable with this option, please choose one of the other options above.)
About Alien Times and the Fundraising Week
Alien Times is a free publication that has been providing information in English to Tsukuba's residents since 1987. The magazine is published once per month (except for the July/August issue) and there is a companion blog site where the articles are archived (TsukuBlog: http://blog.alientimes.org).
The printing of Alien Times is generously subsidized by the Tsukuba Expo '85 Memorial Foundation and supported by a number of local sponsors including Blomster Anna (flower shop), Fleur de Lis (jewelry shop), IACE (travel agent), Isebu (printer), Isshinryu Karate, and J-Cool (hair salon). We also get some income from our website (basically enough to cover the cost of the website).
All of the people who work on Alien Times are volunteers and none of the money that comes into the Alien Times accounts gets paid to any editor, contributor, or volunteer. All of the income goes towards the printing costs, the website costs (only the hosting and domain fees -- all of the design work and maintenance is done by volunteers), and the costs incurred while managing the publication (e.g. binders for the archives, stamps to send copies of magazines to contributors).
The editors of Alien Times are dedicated to keeping the magazine free so that it can be distributed to various locations around the city and be spotted and picked up easily by the people who need the information (foreign residents and tourists). However, in order to keep the magazine free, we need to do some fundraising!
We are hoping to raise approximately 50,000 yen this week, which is the approximate cost of printing a single monthly issue. We have never asked for the Tsukuba community to contribute financially to the making of the magazine, but we thought that maybe it was time to bow our heads and ask humbly for your support.
If you have benefitted from Alien Times or TsukuBlog in the past, please consider making a small donation to show your appreciation and to help ensure the continuation of our community's English magazine and website.
We sincerely appreciate your support,
The Alien Times Staff
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AT Server Down on Saturday
The Alien Times and TsukuBlog websites will be down for scheduled maintenance on Saturday, September 27 from 10am to 2pm.
Apologies for the inconvenience.
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Contribute to TsukuBlog
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!
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Mission Accomplished
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!
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Moderating Comments
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.
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