1 Is it OK to tell you that the top rotation looks excellent?

I've seen the pic title against a dark and a light background, and they're both very readable.

2 Thank you, I appreciate it. This was a lot of work, and I'm glad it came out well.

3 For posterity:
The last old-style top rotation picture, which was displayed for the 5pm hour UTC (1pm hour EDT), depicted Miu from <i>Kenichi the Mightiest Disciple</i>. She appears to be crouching on all fours on a ceiling beam as if she's hiding or eavesdropping. She's in her apron-and-purple-bodysuit outfit, and the viewpoint is 3/4 from behind, carefully set up so as to show off both her bosom and her buttocks (the latter look like she's smuggling watermelons in her bodysuit, in keeping with the show's bold premise that consistently modeled, consistently attractive character animation is for losers).
The new top picture does look great - that didn't take long from the audience's perspective! Getting a new picture with every refresh might prove to be far too much entertainment...

4 *applause*  The new title stands out well against bright-dark-bright transitions too.

5

There is one thing that I still don't quite like. The flash is really close to the left margin, but there's a bunch of space above it. I'm not quite sure why. What I don't know about CSS would fill books.

Anyway, it doesn't look right. It would be nice if the left margin and top margin were the same.

The flash itself (it's called "chooser.swf") is only 22K, which is nicely compact. Adding things to the rotation is pretty easy, but it does require me to make changes to the FLA file and then recompile it. No big deal, though. The hardest part is getting the pictures uploaded. If there are just a few of them, then it's just a drudge. If there are a whole lot, it means bugging Pixy for help.

As I'm sure you all have noticed, there is a small delay after the page is loaded before chooser can get the image downloaded and displayed. It's only a fraction of a second, but it's definitely observable. There isn't anything I can do about that.

If I fouled up the data table and chooser tries to load an image which isn't there, the label will be displayed but the image area will be neutral gray. (That can happen if the table says there are more images for a particular series than there really are.)

6 http://anime.zaitcev.us/wide_chizumatic.png

I find it more convenient to use a windowed browser, no matter the screen size. I know that the majority surf maximized, but I don't.

7

Looks like you're using the old CSS file from your browser cache. Try reloading the page a couple of times, or in extremis you may need to clear your browser cache.

Also, are you using a flash blocker?

8 Thank you, Shift-Reload did it.

9 Bravo!  It looks very nice.  I think I'm going to like the wider columns.
I'm not a huge fan of using flash for something like this, but I understand using the tools you know.  I do like the fact that now we have the option to zoom in on the images.  I'm sure that feature won't get any abuse with the kind of shots you choose...

10 It probably could have been done with JavaScript, but I don't know JavaScript anything like well enough to pull it off.

11 Random image plugins in jQuery or Javascript are all over the web, a few minutes of googling would get you one that works.  Integrating it into Minx might be a bit harder, and of course you wouldn't have the label functionality you got from flash.  Reworking one of the plugins to do that for you would be relatively easy for someone who knows jQuery, but that's not you.<br>I generally avoid flash in building apps just because there is no guarantee that whatever developer follows me will have the knowledge or tools to support it, which is obviously not an issue you're going to worry about.  There is also the performance issue of sending the flash to the client, but you already stated that your file is nicely compact.  Really the only problem left is what happens for non-flash clients.  I suspect when I go home and visit this site from my android tablet, I'm going to see a "theres a widget here, do you want to run it?" icon at the top of the page rather than a nice image.

12 I normally run with a flash blocker, but for a site like this that has a single dedicated flash script (as opposed to a bazillion advertising or tracking applets) I'm more than happy to whitelist it.

Also, the new labels are much easier to read than some of the old ones - you did a great job with those (as others have mentioned).

13 With regards to the space above the flash, it looks like the cause is the mee.nu menu area is just a little too tall, which stretches out the table height causing the gap. Two things that seem to resolve the issue are adding a valign="top" to the flash td element, or removing one of the br tags above the hr in the menu.

14 Benzeen, thanks for the help. I took out one of the breaks, and now it's fine.

15 It really does look great.

(Aside from Javascript, there's probably a way to do it in PHP.  I need to learn enough PHP to do a really low-level picture Gallery to replace Coppermine on one of my sites, which is the constant target of script-kiddies.)

16

I can't run PHP on mee.nu. Only Pixy can do that.

Folks, can we stop talking about all the other ways I could have done this?

17

...but we hadn't gotten to the idea with the flipbook of screenshots, and the webcam pointed at the flipbook, and the catgirl to turn the page once an hour.

...actually, that idea works better without the flipbook, so never mind.

18 And a belated "thank you" for the changes!  The unreadability of titles on series I wasn't familiar with has been a pet peeve of mine for ages, and you've solved it wonderfully!  The extra space is an added bonus.  I had to sit there for a while reloading pictures...

19

It really is difficult to resist the urge to keep reloading just to see what you'll get. I've gotten hooked that way, too. Apparently a lot of people did yesterday. Sitemeter says I got the same number of unique visitors yesterday as the day before (mid 800's), but half again as many page loads (2800 vs 1800).

20 I just noticed that the flash is not clickable. Before, clicking on the top rotation brought one to the site root.

21 The logo does that now, but not the whole image.