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

Apologies for the inconvenience.

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 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!

2 Comments

• At June 8, 2007, Why WordPress Is The Only Blogging Platform I’d Recommend wrote:

  [...] Shaney says, “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.” Read the rest… [...]

• At June 9, 2007, TsukuBlog » The Blogger to WordPress Switcheroo wrote:

  [...] 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 [...]

2 Comments

• At March 22, 2007, Cars wrote:

  :)

• At March 22, 2007, Shaney wrote:

  I guess I should say that I changed this setting once we moved over to WordPress. WordPress has an excellent spam filter called Akismet that has already caught about 400 spam comments since the switch (about 1 month ago). So no moderation anymore. Comment away!

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.

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.

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?

3 Comments

• At August 10, 2006, Daddy B wrote:

  No problem as far as I'm concerned. More power!
  
  -daddy b

• At August 11, 2006, RrFish wrote:

  I have no problem with that at all. Besides, some people might only read the printed version of AT and are not even aware of TsukuBlog!

• At August 14, 2006, Lua Alvher wrote:

  Shaney,I have no problem, most of us as tsukuresidents most encourage you for the effort to keep update the news, events etc.
  In fact, not all the people have the internet access, for that reason the print version also is necessary,
  gambatte tsukugirl!

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!

3 Comments

• At October 2, 2006, RrFish wrote:

  Hi Shaney, has the October issue of AT been printed already? I want to e-mail you, but couldn't find your e-mail address in my account. I'm sorry I must've deleted it by mistake.

• At October 2, 2006, Shaney wrote:

  Hi there,
  
  I couldn't find your address either! Sorry! The October issue is online, but the paper edition hasn't been printed yet.
  
  I haven't added any names to the Tsukublog articles in the online version yet.

• At October 2, 2006, RrFish wrote:

  OK, I'll send a message through your website then.

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?