(In chronogical order, starting from the bottom)
17 December 2005 (Beijing)
- Added names from the Chinese translation of Eyewitness Handbooks - Birds of the World (Dorling Kindersley 1993). Mostly Taiwanese-based names.
2 December 2005 (Beijing)
- Added to cultural note on the bustards (Otididae).
12 November 2005 (Beijing)
- Reinstated FreeFind search.
10 November 2005 (Beijing)
- For some completely inexplicable reason, the Japanese name for the frigate bird, , was written クンカンドリ . This has now been fixed.
8 November 2005 (Beijing)
- Added photo link and fixed up one layout error.
7 November 2005 (Beijing)
- Uploaded a few pages that do not appear to have been uploaded properly on 16 September.
6 November 2005 (Beijing)
18 October 2005 (Beijing)
- Corrected photo link at broadbills.
6 October 2005 (Beijing)
- Added a multilingual heading to another page that lacked it (Rallidae).
18 September 2005 (Beijing)
- Changed references to Birds of Hong Kong and South China from (HK) to (Viney).
- A few other minor changes.
17 September 2005 (Beijing)
- Corrected a few miscellaneous errors from yesterday's update.
- Rectified a sequence error in Polyplectron.
16 September 2005 (Beijing)
- Reverted Vịt mắt trắng to Vịt mặt trắng (see Anatidae), but left a note stating that Vịt mắt trắng would be better.
- Added some alternative Vietnamese names at Anatidae, Pelecanidae, Ardeidae, Turdinae, etc.
- A little tidying up of 'Return to Top' arrows (
). The 'About this table' Toolbit sign has been spruced up slightly with tiny arrows and moved in some cases. The 'About this table' notice itself has been placed on the Index Page as well. - Fixed one small error.
15 September 2005 (Beijing)
- Flushed out the last unconverted graphics and changed them to Unicode. Only those that cannot be represented in Unicode still remain in graphic form.
- Added a Cultural Note to Psittaculidae.
- Added English common name 'Chinese hill warbler' to Rhopophilus pekinensis. Corrected a couple of transliteration erors on the same page (will they never stop coming?).
14 September 2005 (Beijing)
- Added a proverb to Corvinae.
- Fixed an error in the Chinese language index.
- Replaced a remaining graphic that had been left in by accident.
12 September 2005 (Macau)
- Corrected a few minor errors.
- Added a Tooltip for another character not supported by many browsers (Anas quequedula / Anas formosa).
10 September 2005 (Macau)
- Added more links to Anatidae.
- Added 'Scientific & English, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese' column super-heading to the rest of the subsite.
- Corrected one or two small errors (including what appears to be a mistaken Vietnamese name for the Ferruginous duck/pochard Aythya nyroca).
9 September 2005 (Macau)
- Added a few photo links (Anatidae).
- Added a 'superheading' to many of the species lists (dividing them into Scientific & English, Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese).
7 September 2005 (Macau)
- After many flip-flops, I have finally decided on a change of policy concerning the use of the green background to show occurrence of species in China, Taiwan, Japan, and Vietnam.
- The green background is now used only at official species names. No background is used for 'Other names'. This will make it easier to identify in exactly how many of the four territories a species occurs.
- Mainland China and Taiwan are now treated as separate zones in terms of occurrence of species. Thus a bird endemic to Taiwan will now be coloured green only in the Taiwan column; the Mainland column will be white. Previously, the Mainland list was a kind of 'master list' for all of China, including Taiwan, and the Taiwanese names were a secondary list to the right. The basis for this change is purely terminological. Taiwan has its own bird names, which a person going to Taiwan can be expected to encounter. Similarly, the Mainland has its own common names which hold sway in the PRC. Showing clearly the distribution of species between Taiwan and the Mainland is useful information. Moreover, the previous approach tangled the three Chinese-language columns together in a confused way. It is cleaner, and less confusing, to keep them separate. The third column ('Other Chinese'), still shows alternative names as found in both China and Taiwan. (It would be ideal if the Chinese-language, Japanese-language, and Vietnamese-language columns could be bundled together into three distinct 'language zones' but I have not yet found a good way of doing this.)
- In addition: A few alternative Chinese scientific names which were previously missed have been moved to the main column (beneath the bar). A Tooltip has been added to a couple of characters to summon up a graphic of the simplified character where not available in Unicode. One or two Japanese names have been added (from the Internet). A couple of minor errors have been corrected. One menu error has been fixed.
5 September 2005 (Macau)
- Replaced the explanation above each table with a Tooltip that brings the explanation up if the mouse is hovered over the text. The idea is to remove clutter.
- Added a Cultural Note to the Scolopacinae.
3 September 2005 (Macau)
- Added a little mascot at the top in place of the old navigation buttons. (Marylou Guo processed the image for me). Navigation at the bottom has also been changed.
- Added a centralised search page (using Google), linked to from every page.
- Fixed up a few errors (including the restoration of my email address, deleted by Dreamweaver in June).
- Fixed up incorrect links at Chinese, Japanese, and Vietnamese site maps.
- Added some photo links (mainly at Flycatchers) and cultural notes (regarding haiku season words).
31 August 2005 (Macau)
- Fixed up a couple of small errors (mainly links and fonts).
29 August 2005 (Macau)
- Fixed up quite a few Javascript menu errors, a result of incomplete testing when the Milonic menu was implemented last year. Some anchors were also deleted by Dreamweaver in June.
- Changed the Javascript 'Index' menu so that a choice can be made between going to 'Passerines' and 'Non-Passerines' in the five indexes/site maps.
- Changed style of links to a cleaner look.
- Added author and publication details to graphics of books used as sources.
- Cleaned up The Use of Kanji to Write Japanese Bird Names for residual errors.
26 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Revamped the menu on multiple-page families/subfamilies. The menu is now arranged by page number. Previously the menu adopted a 'seamless' approach which disregarded page divisions. In actual use I have found this inconvenient. (With the splitting up into individual pages, the division into tribes at some families has turned out to be rather awkward, however.)
- Added arrows
to allow rotation among pages within a family. - Replaced a couple of remaining graphics in Woodpeckers.
- Linked to this page from the Index page.
- Slightly touched up prose in Sources.
25 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Corrected a few errors. Added a few links to photos. Added Certhia quantianensis.
23 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Rectified a couple of errors (caused by unintentional deletion of graphics in June -- see 26 June). I suspect there are more deletions I have not yet picked up. Also fixed up a few glosses relating to hồng.
22 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Added multi-lingual titles to pages that didn't have them.
- Added Tooltips for two more characters (the old character for shrike and for nuthatch in Simplified Chinese).
- Fixed up a couple of menu problems.
- Slightly rewrote the General Names section for Accipitrinae.
- Fixed up a few layout errors, etc.
21 August 2005 (Beijing)
- The Notes have all been converted to Unicode. A few further Tooltips added. That just about wraps it up, except for cleaning up.
20 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Uploaded the new Site Maps for Chinese (Simplified), Chinese (Traditional), Japanese, and Vietnamese. Also updated the Javascript menus.
- Corrected some errors and added some Chinese bird names.
- Converted the Sources page to Unicode.
- Added Tooltips (thanks to Walter Zorn) to show graphics of recent Unicode characters not supported on many computers (the Unicode will show up as a square or question mark). Also, where I have been forced to use a non-simplified character because Unicode is missing the simplified version, I have used Tooltips to summon up a graphic of the correct simplified form.
19 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Corrected a few errors.
17 August 2005 (Beijing)
- Corrected some errors.
16 August 2005 (Beijing)
- All major files are now fully converted to Unicode and uploaded, with the exception of Sources and Introductory Notes. The site is now transparent to search engines and browsers that are Unicode-enabled. Just a few characters could not be covered, mostly rarer characters that are not in the Unicode set.
15 August 2005 (Beijing)
Started uploading the fully converted Unicode files -- virtually all graphics have been changed to Unicode. There have also been other changes:
- Vietnamese names have been capitalised.
- Japanese names have been all converted to katakana (previously some non-official names were given in hiragana, but this policy was difficult to implement consistently).
- Chinese official names from sources other than the Zheng Guangmei 'World List' (namely, the Atlas of Birds of China, MacKinnon & Phillipps, and Birds of Hong Kong and South China) have been moved to the official names column, separated from the main ZGM entry by a bar.
- Vietnamese names from Nguyen, Le Phillipps have similarly been moved to the official names column, separated from the Vo & Nguyen entry by a bar.
- Some new information (such as use of birds in Mandarin Squares) and corrections have been added.
18 July 2005 (Macau)
- The cleaning up is now complete. Chinese and Japanese romanisations have all been converted to Unicode (with appropriate diacritics instead of numbers for tones) .
- Some sections at the bottoms of pages that were inexplicably omitted when I uploaded have been restored. (Eg., at bulbuls, buntings, falcons, and sandpipers).
- Cultural Notes have been expanded a little (they are more tidbits than full cultural explanations) and extended to a total of 25 families. Moving material to the Cultural Notes has helped clear away some clutter in the main pages. The floating menu has also been updated to point to Cultural Notes.
15 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued cleaning up pages. Added a section of 'Cultural notes' at some families, with miscellaneous items on the place of birds in local culture, for instance, their use as 'season words' in Japanese haiku, etc. Just a few more days.
8 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued cleaning up pages.
7 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued cleaning up pages.
6 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued cleaning up pages. Quite a bit of messy code in there.
5 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued uploading cleaned up pages.
4 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode. Am also deleting width and height specifications inserted in the past by Dreamweaver, in preparation for conversion to characters in Unicode. However, new problems caused by Dreamweaver's faulty 'find and replace' now have to be fixed up ('ignore whitespace differences' seems to be the culprit). The updating will take at least another week.
2 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode.
1 July 2005 (Macau)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode.
30 June 2005 (Macau)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode.
29 June 2005 (Macau)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode.
28 June 2005 (Beijing)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode. The going is slow.
27 June 2005 (Beijing)
- Continued converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode.
26 June 2005 (Beijing)
- Started converting pinyin and Japanese romanisation to Unicode, at the same time implementing cascading styles sheets. Also corrected some errors and rewrote some small sections. This will be gradually completed over the next few weeks. This is a painstaking job due to the incredibly messy code originally generated by Dreamweaver. (Version changes over time only made the situation worse). Plus a legitimate find and replace resulted in the unintentional deletion of many scattered sections of content, which is taking weeks to fix.
6 June 2005 (Macau)
- Changed letters on Vietnamese home page to accord with Unicode (unlike previous Mac-generated mess). Fixed up a few errors in the Vietnamese home page (incorrect links). Rectified some navigation to provide better navigation experience for users of non-English home pages (i.e., Chinese simplified, Chinese traditional, Japanese, and Vietnamese home pages).
8 May 2005 (Beijing)
- Added a few more Chinese alternative names and one Japanese alternative name.
7 May 2005 (Beijing)
- Added a few Chinese alternative names.
9 February 2005 (Macau)
- Basically completed the work of updating and adding photo links. Fixed a few errors. Removed a few references to Cheng where not necessary (since the list no longer takes Cheng as standard).
8 February 2005 (Chinese New Year's Eve) (Macau)
- Added and corrected more photo links. Removed some deep links to one site which, on reflection, could be regarded as 'illegal'.
6 February 2005 (Macau)
- Added and corrected more photo links.
3 February 2005 (Macau)
- Corrected and added a few more photo links.
2 February 2005 (Macau)
- Added a few more photo links and made a few changes to the =Stat of Standardisation of Bird Names (not yet transferred from cjvlang) (mainly with reference to Vietnamese).
1 February 2005 (Macau)
- A few more photo links added.
30 January 2005 (Macau)
- Continued adding photo links.
29 January 2005 (Macau)
- Continued adding photo links, including the restoration of some links to Mike Danzenbaker's site.
28 January 2005 (Macau)
- Added photo links to Garrulacinae.
26 January 2005 (Macau)
- Restored and added photo links to Ibises.
23 January 2005 (Macau)
- Restored a few more links to Mike Danzenbaker's site of bird photos (especially Ardeidae) and added a few other links.
22 January 2005 (Macau)
- Restored a few more links to Mike Danzenbaker's site of bird photos (especially Fringillinae, Larinae, and Muscicapinae). Also redirected a few links to point to the East Asian bird photos site and made a few small changes elsewhere.
3 January 2005 (Macau)
- Continued restoring direct links to photos on Mike Danzenbaker's site of bird photos.
2 January 2005 (Macau)
- Started restoring direct links to photos on Mike Danzenbaker's site of bird photos (with Mike's permission).
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Floating Menu by Milonic |
Tool tips by Walter Zorn |
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