New Year Brings New Alumni Site Features

By Rees Clark '60

Remember, you can invite a friend to register in the directory.

Please participate in our reader poll on new projects for 2005. See the Front Page.

The following is the text of a letter to be e-mailed to registered alumni during January.

TCHS Alumni News January 2005 Dear Alumni and Friends of TCHS: TEMPORARY SITE OUTAGE REPAIRED First, I'm writing to reassure you in case you tried to visit the alumni site between Nov 17 and Dec 10. TCHS Alumni News is alive and well. Unfortunately, our domain registration renewal apparently did not complete correctly, and the tchsalumni.org domain was in renewal limbo for several days. The site now also responds to companion domains at http://tchsalumni.org OR http://tchsalumni.net. GROWING MEMBERSHIP Second, we've added several hundred persons to the rolls this year, roughly doubling membership last year at this time. The directory count is now 1,238 - up from 720 reported in January 2004. This includes some 300 people who found us during the run-up to the TC Schools anniversary in October. Since April 2002, we've served over a half-million page views to over 37,000 readers. Our weekly average is about 4,000 pages read by around 700 to 800 readers. (Do you have a business that would like to advertise with us? That's more readers than most online community newspapers can claim.) OBSOLETE ADDRESSES About 100 members are not receiving this message, because they've changed their email providers and not updated their records. (A list of those members is available by clicking Update Contacts at left.) If you know one or more of the persons listed, please make contact and ask them to update. Remember: You can update your address easily from the same page with the missing persons list. NEW CALENDAR The alumni calendar has been reworked, and you can now add events. Please limit your events to those related directly to alumni affairs; we've left the door open, but if too much extraneous material is posted to the calendar we'll have to lock it up again. Our calendar uses the standard iCalendar format, so if you use iCal on the Mac or any of several calendar applications (e.g., Outlook) on Windows, it's easy to download it and incorporate the alumni calendar into your desktop or contact manager. Now if we could just get TCHS to put items into the calendar we'd really be a full service provider. Temple City residents take note! PERSONAL JOURNALS In January 2005 we'll add a new feature to the system. Members who subscribe in support of the association may sign up for a personal web journal (aka "blog") valued at over $100 per year. Each personal journal includes a calendar and image gallery (up to five megabytes of storage). ABOUT YOU AND YOURS... We can only report your news to alumni if you report it to us. We want to know about your career, your family, your travels... In the magazine you'll find a To The Editor form that provides a way for you to send an article to the editor for publication. Just drop your text into the form and send it along. CLASS SITES Does your class have a web site? Complete class web sites are available. Class sites share the alumni directory but have their own newsletters. We ask a contribution of $100 per year to support a site for your class. How does that compare to the "free" sites out there? Well those sites are free of design choices, free of style, free of support services and free of interest in your project. Ours on the other hand are free of problems, freely support designs of your own making, and freely enable you to publish your class news from anywhere with just a browser. If you would like to edit a class site please contact me. SUBSCRIPTIONS Let me take this opportunity to thank you for your continued interest and to send special acknowledgment to those who've subscribed to the association. Subscribers are indicated by a gold ram badge next to their name in the directory. Subscriptions keep this from being a one-person show and help pay the very real expenses we incur. Subscribers may also request a permanent email address (you@tchsalumni.org) that forwards to your regular mailbox; it's a great way to track your alumni correspondence. Annual subscriptions are only $19.00; your contribution goes to the support of the site, and any surplus goes to TCHS Alumni Dollars for Scholars®. And it's about you, not about nameless faceless millions as at some commercial sites. Why not put your support into your association instead of into web site profits of people who never heard of Temple City High School? Five hundred paid subscribers would put the association on its feet, pay all its bills, and create a surplus that would lead to an endowed scholarship program. Please subscribe. NEW SERVICE IDEAS If you have ideas for what you'd like the association and the site to do for you, please write to the editor, or just reply to this message. We want to make it all work as you would have it, not limiting the site to our own peculiarities. For example, would you like to see affiliations with service providers like travel, insurance, discount sales...? These can result in some income to the association - IF the members use them. However, if there is little or no response, as with our former links to Amazon.com and other vendors, the time devoted to creating and maintaining the affiliation(s) would be wasted. Comments/Suggestions? THANK YOU... for your continuing interest in TCHS Alumni News Sincerely, Rees Clark '60 theeditor@tchsalumni.org Editor and President, TCHS Alumni News Assn. http://www.tchsalumni.org

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