I'm extremely pleased to announce that the website which I've been working on for Alcon 2010, a UK anime convention taking place 9th to 12th September 2010 in Leicester, has now gone live and open for registrations! The website can be visited at http://www.alcon.org.uk/.

It's been a bit of a labour of love and a great learning experience putting the website together. Work started early December and in the process I've been expanding my web development skills greatly, as well as getting to grips with jQuery for the first time. Everything that I've learned will feed back into future work and you can expect to see even more interesting things in the not too distant future.

Highlights of the Alcon 2010 website include:

- jQuery enhancement of the registration form which includes input styling, visual styling of completed and uncompleted mandatory fields, images which act as checkboxes, on-the-fly totalling of the subtotal and the jQuery UI dialog box.

- Uses embedded Google Maps to show how to get to the convention and embedded Youtube player to show the Alcon video playlist.

- Number of places remaining displayed in the header automatically refreshes via AJAX to show you the countdown of places.

- Uses the Galleriffic jQuery plugin to display a photo gallery of previous convention photos.

- Use of CSS3 browser implementations to visually enhance the style of the site whilst minimising additonal HTML code and images.

- Memberlist that shows member statistics and list of members attending, which can be filtered by and reloads via AJAX. The list also uses the Scrollfollow jQuery plugin to keep an alphabetical list always in view, inspired by the iPhone OS, allowing quick and easy navigation through the list.

On my last visit to Cardiff, I took the opportunity to visit Otakuzoku. They are a relatively new independant shop selling a mixture of things, primarily anime-related. Haydn and Russ, the guys behind Otakuzoku, kindly accepted to be informally interviewed for kyokohunter.net.

Otakuzoku started to come about March 2009, although the seeds of the idea have existed in their minds for almost 10 years. Although the aim was always to have a shop, they dipped their toes in the online market first to test the viability of the business. Their online shop started up in May 2009 with the initial idea of leaving a year before deciding whether or not to set up physical premises. Things didn't go as planned - though in their case, it was for the better. The online shop received a much better response than expected and so at the end of September 2009, Otakuzoku opened their store in Cardiff.

Otakuzoku explained that they had originally hoped to have a central location in Cardiff but the as the prices were too high, settled for their current location just off the beaten track from the centre. It's an area popular for student accommodation, so already Otakuzoku are in a great area to appeal to customers.

Otakuzoku sells an eclectic mixture of things. They've got a wide range of manga in particular with many titles that you won't find at your average Waterstones and at a price that's much more palpable - the cheapest start from just under £3. They also sell a variety of console hardware, games, DVDs, CDs, merchandise and Warhammer.

They are extremely passionate about the genuinity of what they sell - they work hard to ensure that what they sell is genuine and licenced. Although they primarily source stock from UK and French suppliers, they are working on their Japanese connections and hope to have a regular supply from Japan. I certainly welcome this, having seen the wide and fantastic variety of licensed merchandise in Japan for myself. Otakuzoku also wants to stock licensed cosplay, although this will be a far trickier market as it's awash with unlicensed manufacturers.

Otakuzoku certainly seem to be doing well and in the future said they would love to set up a chain of franchised stores. It's a bold goal, so at the moment they're concentrating on building up their range of stock and revamping their website.

It was a pleasure to speak to them, as they're extremely passionate about what they sell, and I wish them the best of luck on their ventures. If you're ever in Cardiff or happen to live nearby, don't forget to pop in sometime! And even if you're not, you can visit their website at http://www.otakuzoku.com/.

I've spent the weekend in London primarily to go to Animeleague Club London (ALCL) that took place on the 14th November. With the loss of the London Anime Club, Animeleague has stepped in to fill the gap and put on it's own spin on the idea of a club. Animeleague does a number of other events, ranging from small meetups of members across the country to an annual convention, Alcon, that takes place in Leicester. With Animeleague Club London, the idea seems to be to take the atmosphere and events of a convention and shrink it down into a one day club.

ALCL took place at the America Square Slug & Lettuce, a stone's throw away from Tower Hill underground station. It appears to be a fairly quiet area of London at the weekend and not too hard to get to - unless you're affected by any of the tube closures going on at the moment. The venue itself is well sized for a club with a comfortable feel to it.

There were a number of different areas set up along with associated activities. Video gaming occupied the area towards the front of the first room, with a chillout area and Artist's Alley straddeling the main bar. At the back of the first room was the area for panels, such as Akemi Solloway's Japanese lessons. There was also an additional room which housed anime screenings and the ever-popular dealer's room, which made way later on to become the dance floor.

There were a variety of different consoles on offer in the video gaming section. This area was really popular and was quite difficult to move around most of the day - seats were really close together so there wasn't much room for passageway. I didn't do any gaming apart from Street Fighter, which really showed up how little I game these days!

The Artist's Alley was a good place to chill out, with paper and pencils available to draw. It's always great to see some good quality work at these events - there's some real talent out there. Just a shame I forgot to collect mine and my girlfriend's work, as we'd both done variations on Asuka from Evangelion.

The panels area didn't get visited much by myself - I was kept occupied by the other sections, such as the dealer's room! I managed to get in the queue for the dealers room at a decent opportunity, as some people were queuing for about 40 minutes to get in. The area for dealers was relatively small compared to other events I've been to. This isn't a fault of the club, as there's only a limited space in the Slug & Lettuce. Still, there was a reasonable variety of different things on offer from familiar dealers, from DVDs to manga to figures. It'd be nice to see different dealers at future ALCLs - perhaps they could rotate attendance between themselves.

There were a few anime screenings on - wasn't sure of some of what I watched (a baseball show) but Kuroshitsuji (Black Butler) piqued our interest and will make it onto my growing 'to watch' list. The area also provided an ideal place to crash out for a bit whilst we regained our energy.

Attendance was really good and it's brilliant to see a decent turnout for a brand new event. There were much more people around for the first half of the event, from noon until about 6pm. After that, people seemed to thin out. It's hard to pin it down to a single factor but I suspect tiredness, lack of funds (after spending in the dealers room!), being in the same space for a long period of time and a lack of special events later on possibly resulted in this. We still partied on to the end - somebody had to provide the life and the soul of the party! We did have a small but good group of people right to the end.

So, what could be improved? There were a few hiccups along the way: televisions were late arriving (through no fault of ALCL), a few events dropped off the programme such as the DDR tournament and P*ss Artist (both of which I was looking forward to), there didn't seem to be enough power leads to run everything at the same time and problems with the audio later on meant the music wasn't as great as it could have been.

Hopefully ALCL improve these things for the next time it runs. It might also be prudent to promote it as two different events from the start - a club that runs during the afternoon and a party that runs during the evening. It could hopefully attract the two different clientles needed to get the best attendance for both parts.

So is it worth going to in future? If you don't live too far from London then it's certainly worth a try if you haven't gone already - anime events are always fun and it's great to talk to new peope, which is why I'm addicted to them. Those coming from further afield however might be better off saving their money for Alcon - which has a similar atmosphere in a much larger space over more days and the bonus of accommodation to crash at right on campus.

Finally, apologies for the lack of pictures - I was so distracted during the event that it didn't cross my mind! If anybody has pictures that they'd be willing to have put up here, I'll collate them all into a single post and include a link to your website. You can get in touch via Twitter or my Facebook.

Spent last weekend at Alcon 2009, one of the growing number of anime conventions in the UK. Alcon has been running for three years now, with Alcon 2008 being the first anime convention that I went to. Was great to return this year and meet up with people both familiar and new.

There were a lot of good cosplays about - highlights for me were Taiga Aisaka, Emperor Lelouch, Vocaloid cosplay group and Mio from K-ON!. Was also in cosplay myself as genderbent Mio and school uniform Lelouch. Pleased at the great response I got, including for the tail I was wearing the rest of the time - the tail got danced with more than I did ^^;

As well as being there to enjoy the convention I also volunteered to help out as a gopher. Spent most of my time on the Artists Alley, where we held a number of guest panels including workshops with Sonia Leong and Akemi Solloway, the Iron Artist competition and an area in which artists can sit and draw in peace. I also co-hosted the DDR (Dance Dance Revolution) tournament with Adam Clark, a fellow DDR addict and friend. Although as hosts we didn't take part in the competition itself, we had a versus match on Candy on Heavy - I was happier with the result than Adam was! ^^

There was plenty of events going on and it was difficult prioritising what to go to, made harder by gophering - managed to get to the UKOtaku new media panel and the Gundam model making panels. Essential visits were also made to the dealers room and bring & buy - spent a little bit more than planned but especially pleased with the Muv-Luv alternative figure and collectors edition Alien 9 boxset that I picked up.

After a great convention I'm looking forward to next year's upsized Alcon with anticipation. It's proposed to run at a much higher capacity, which will be a challenge for the Alcon team - if they can crack the planning and organisation in advance, then the hard work of the staff I saw this year will pay off again in 2010. One of the most important aspects to Alcon is it's sense of community, and how this will change with an influx of attendees is hard to predict - I hope they'll enjoy it as much as I have!