Finally finished

it all works fine in IE6/Win2K from what I’ve seen. I think you could get some better pics of Chen Fake doing the first Routine from Jarek’s China from Inside:
https://www.chinafrominside.com/ma/
They’re a better quality than the one’s you’ve got… Then again, they do look familiar. Maybe you’ve just stretched the photos a bit and that’s why they look so pixellated.
Anyway, interesting looking blog. I’m gonna put it through Babel Fish (I don’t understand Portuguese) to see what you say. I practice Tai Chi (Beijing 24, Yang and Chen) so check out my blog every now and then.

Yeah, the only real problem is with the pictures being stretched. They fit the design there, but the pixelation from the stretching is a little distracting. See if you can effectively enlarge them with another program, or else just get bigger ones.
I totally dig the text fade-in effect – how did you do that (I haven’t even glanced at any code right now).
I like the contractible (sp?) menues, but you might be able to make them integrate a bit better. Maybe a simple box around it entirely, or just a shaded backgrounded could help draw them away from the content itself.
Overall a very nice job, I’ll take a quick look at the forums later.

evilguile: the pics are from Jarek’s site, i had to stretch them a little so the width is the same as the menu’s width. His pics are 93×113, and i show them 140×170. I wish i could see the real ones, i would scan them in a higher resolution… The translation on automatic translators is a bit comic, but please try it! I went to your site but could only see the frontpage, no link to the blog.
indieboi: I will try some other way of enlarging the pics, good idea. You can find a discussion about the fade-in here, it was Stevarino who helped me out with that. The menus use this code. I will try some background colouring for them.
Thanks for the feedback!

anatman…
Is there a way you can make your code for the nicer archives with category sorting available? I saw other posts on this elsewhere, but no one seemed to be able to get it to work the way you have. Can you post a link to it here?
Thanks.

The code is by LaughingLizard, it is here: https://dinki.mine.nu/weblog/b2-img/narchives.phps (his website). That has category sorting available, but to make it show up by default please read this thread: https://www.ads-software.com/support/10/3711 – the second post with LL’s instructions is what i did to get category view by default.

How’d you get that cool fade-in effect?

This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Transitional!
Otherwise very nice work, specially the fade effect, seems like people dig it ??

Jim Kerr, the how-to for the fade-in is here, that is a thread with Stevarino teaching me how to do it step by step.
MaxT, thanks for pointing my XHTML error out – i fiddled with some images after i posted this thread and broke the validation by not closing an image tag… will fix that.

The site looks magnificent in FireFox, slightly less magnificent in IE (running XP). And I only see one scroll bar in the forum on both FireFox and IE, and that’s the one that’s supposed to be there (unless you want to hide the bottom half of the forum, of course)…
The pop-up menus, of course, don’t work in IE, but I suppose you’re aware of that.
Also, I’d advise to change the picture, like the others have said – either get the full-sized picture from somewhere, or have a completely different picture (I don’t know the first thing about tai-chi, despite living in Beijing, but is there any reason you wanted that particular picture instead of some other?)
And how come the text in the fade-in starts out as light grey, not completely white? I don’t know if it’s a limitation of the script or what, but when I load the page, at first I see very very light grey text for a few seconds, and then it fades to black. Can’t it be set to completely white text in the beginning? That would make the effect more, well, effective…
Two questions that confuse me:
1) Why is it that the area around the menu points that ‘create’ pop-up menus has a help cursor? (Ie. when you hover over the area just left and right of “Categories”, “Links” and “Meta”, there’s a help cursor) – Wouldn’t it make more sense to just have a default cursor?
2) How come the title of the Yin link is “Visualiza?§?￡o para o dia” and the title of the Yang link is “Visualiza?§?￡o para a noite”? Shouldn’t it logically be the other way around?
But these are tiny things – overall, the site looks awesome. Thumbs up.

Hey Oisin, thank you for the feedback!
Scrollbar: i ended up solving the former scrollbar problem, it has been looking ok for a little while now. It was an overflow:auto; declaration that made an unwanted scrollbar appear.
Pop-up menus and help cursor over the Categories, Links and Meta: these two are related. I knew the menus wouldn’t work in IE, so i made a “all the links” page and linked to them from the words “Categories”, “Links” and “Meta”. I changed the cursor over them to try to get the reader to read (hehe) the tooltip on those words. I don’t love the help cursor also, maybe i will change it back to the normal cursor…
Fade-in starting grey: yes, it is true, it starts grey. I was not sure if it was good this way, or starting completely white. Now that “all the links” page has a light grey background for the two columns with links in them – this was one of the reasons i decided to start light grey. I could solve this i i were able to pass a parameter to that initialColor() function that sets the initial color for the text, but i have no idea how to do that! I may change that, too.
Pictures: i am in the process of getting those pics in a better quality. Those are pictures of a legendary taichi master, Chen Fake, and are very rare. I know the owner of the originals, but he has to get permission from his elders before i can get to scan them. This will take a while, you know.
Yin and Yang: of course, you are completely right! I changed them around by accident, i will correct that. Thanks for pointing this out.

(I find it quite amusing that a legendary tai-chi master should be named Fake. Especially if his surname, Chen, is Cantonese, ’cause then it would be Zhen in Mandarin, and that means ‘true’. So basically, ‘True Fake’ :P)

Hahaha!
That Chen is Mandarin, the Chen family is from northern China (Henan province, Wenxian county)… and Fa Ke are two words, i will search for their meaning but i can’t be sure to find.
Now, thanks to Jesuit, the fade-in will start at light grey in pages with light grey background, and will start white in pages with white background (will take a day to update the site). He has cooked a plugin that make the fade-in effect available to all WP users, it can be found here:
https://hacks.chrisjdavis.org/wp-fade.phps
If someone uses it, please leave him a comment saying thanks.

I did a little search ??
Apparently, he’s called é????‘?§‘ in Chinese – Fa Ke might be taken to mean something along the lines of “He who will bring prosperity to the family”… but it could also just mean “distribution branch” (the former is probably more likely, I’d say)…
(And it’s Wen County, not Wenxian County – ??? (xian) means “county”)

Hey Oisin,
I visited your site (not just the WP installation), it is awesome.
Thanks for the info on Chen Fake’s name – i didn’t know that. And indeed he brought prosperity to his family, whose taichi style was hardly known outside Wen county ?? before he travelled to Beijing.
Are you in China to learn chinese?

Yup, that’s why I’m here ??
And thanks for liking my site 8)
I kind of like it too ?? (except that it table based and probably doesn’t validate – I’ll tackle that later…)