See the article on ‘Chinese cabbage’ for details.

This should be my final comment for now….

You have bottled water listed as 矿春水 kuang4 chun2 shui3. Do you mean 矿泉水 kuang4 quan2 shui3, mineral water?

This may be a north/south difference, or a branding issue, or I’ve just simply got it wrong. It’s a really useful site though.

CMS: Wordpress is a CMS, Joomla and Drupal, Plone,Wikimedia are other popular CMSs. Basically, they’re a way to write content for the web without having to hard-code the HTML yourself. They do lots of useful stuff like RSS automatically and make life easy in general.

Agree about the lack of consistency in cooking, and that personal views may not be the best. Thinking in the way Wordpress works, think of something like a post for each dish, then each user could add their own photos, comments, recipes to their heart’s delight. Note sure how interactive your want to go, but it’s a way to get people coming back. There’s essentially no difference between the tech that a blog is made from, and that a forum is made from – the difference is permissions – who can start a post/topic and who can make a reply. I’d recommend a blog structure because blogs tend to have better tagging, and forums often/usually suck at that.

I think it’s better to think about this technical stuff at the outset, because changing things later is a hassle, and if someone sees the idea and comes along with a better technical solution they could essentially steal your thunder/traffic.

Drop me an email if you’ve technical questions.

Cheers,

Alex

http://www.maskofchina.com

Flash cards are a great idea. I’ll look into that.

@Alex

I agree that the site is definitely lacking the collaborative element. I decided early on to stay away from recommendations since there are so many variables. The gong bao ji ding in one restaurant might be great, but in another restaurant might be not so great. I’ve even noticed you can often order the same dish in the same restaurant on different days, and if there is a different cook they will cook it completely differently. This is especially the case when you start comparing dishes in different parts of the country. For example when you order hot and sour soup in Fuzhou it is full of sugar. Inland, it tastes completely different. But there does need to be some kind of interaction. I was thinking a forum would be a good place to start. If people wanted to rate food, or give their own recommendations and what not, it would be up to them, and it would give people a reason to keep coming back to the site. I have looked around at online forums, and have yet to find one I really like. Ideally, I’d like one that I can imbed directly into the site. Another possibility is to add functionality so that at the bottom of each page, viewers could add their own comments. If anybody has experience doing this, let me know. By the way, what is CMS?

@ JetSo

Cantonese food is on the way too. Problem is there aren’t any good Cantonese restaurants that I know of here in Fuzhou. And most that are here just have 套餐. Last fall I spent two weeks in Guangzhou for work, and ate possibly better than I ever have before in my life.

@ Matt in Chongqing

Yeah, I think you’re right about the ha mi gua. I think I actually read somewhere in English where it was actually called a hami melon. Anybody have a better translation?

@ Dezza

You’re right on the photos. I am still pretty much a photography 菜鸟 and this is my first big photography project. One of the difficulties is that most of these shots had to be taken on the go, as for the past month I have been that annoying guy who always needs to take pictures of food before anybody can dig in. Any more suggestions though? What do you think about the contrast? I normally can’t do much about the lighting, since the photos are taken in restaurants. Usually I use the curves function in Photoshop to brighten them up a bit. I think the ones of the fruits and veggies look alright, but a lot of the pics of dishes are still quite sloppy.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/lynnintokyo/collections/72157600033010825/

I’ve learned a lot from just viewing her work.