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June 2008 – Stylesheets for the entire BIROCO.COM have been revised to take account of higher resolution screens becoming more commonplace. In the process I have made changes to the YIJING DAO site. Typography and leading have been improved for readability, and numerous little details tidied up or simplified. Most notably I have removed the Big5 Harvard-Yenching Zhouyi and made the UTF-8 Unicode version the only one available. The Big5 version had had its day, and now I am more satisfied having only the Unicode transcription here, because it is completely accurate, whereas the Big5 version had to employ a number of substitute characters to take account of their absence in Big5 encoding. Both screen and print stylesheets now specify Chinese fonts by name, with SimSun coming first, followed by PMingLiu, with a generic serif. I have also made a separate pinyin transcription.

May 2007 – Those using Edward Shaughnessy's book on the Mawangdui Yijing often express frustration that he gives a chart listing the hexagrams in Mawangdui order but not in the received King Wen order, making it difficult to look up a hexagram if one knows the King Wen number but not the Mawangdui number. I have made a chart (PDF) that addresses this need, conveniently sized so it can be trimmed and glued at the back of the book. I have also slightly revised the article on Yijing hexagram sequences.

February 2007 – At long last I have got round to producing a new transcription of the 1935 Harvard-Yenching Zhouyi in UTF-8 encoding. (In setting the new version I noticed that the first ideographic full stop in the judgment of hexagram 39 had been erroneously set as a superscript in the original 1935 edition, and as a result I overlooked it in my earlier web transcription. This has now been corrected, plus a note added as to how this must have occurred.)

January 2007 – An addendum added to Harmen Mesker's review of Lillian Too's plum blossom numerology book, detailing a serious error in the work. (New links have been added to the links page as well, over the past six months.)

May 2006 – Nigel Richmond and the I Ching. Richmond died in 2005, Joel Biroco looks at his life and work. His two books on the oracle have been scanned and are made available in PDF form. The links page has also been expanded, and a few notes added on diagrams in the scans archive.

February 2006 – A review by Harmen Mesker of Lillian Too's book The New I Ching, based on plum blossom numerology, and a few additions made to the Glossary.

January 2006 – A review of Chung Wu's The Essentials of the Yi Jing, by Harmen Mesker. Also a Glossary of Chinese Yijing terms used on the site, and a few notes on an interesting diagram added to the scans archive showing how reduction of the 64 hexagrams to nuclear hexagrams proceeds in pairs in the 'Before Heaven' arrangement.

October 2005 – A 'compass rose' star pattern in the circular Xiantian diagram, and an experiment to square the circle. I've also expanded my notes on waxing and waning in the bigua sequence to include a comparison with the phases of the moon, and added more about the nature of yin and yang. I have substantially revised my notes on ruling lines.

April 2005 – Ritsema-Sabbadini – Review by Steve Marshall of the new and official Eranos Yijing.

September 2004 – The Laws of Change – Review of Jack M Balkin's translation and commentary, by Steve Marshall.

August 2004 – Bob Dylan and the I Ching – A few references Bob Dylan made to the Book of Changes.

April 2004 – Site redesign in CSS and XHTML launched, adding a fifth option to the menu: 'other'. The former tables-based design was originally conceived as a book reviews site with introduction, links, and Chinese Zhouyi. This did not allow for expansion to include articles, notes, scans, and other miscellanea. In the course of the redesign, some new material was added to the site:

Ken Goodall's review of Ling Ch'I Ching
Steve Marshall's introduction to Lingqijing
New additions to the links section
Joel Biroco's Survey slightly revised
Chinese Zhouyi reformatted
Harmen Mesker's review article on najia

I am especially grateful to Harmen for his new and in-depth review article on three najia fortune-telling books. This purely predictive approach doesn't use the actual text of the Book of Changes at all. Two of the reviewed books also deal with the meihua or 'plum blossom' method.

I have decided to expand the subject area of the site to include material on the Daoist oracle the Lingqijing, or 'Magical Chess Classic', given that there is so little information on it available on the web.

Previous readers will notice that the links to the 'print-friendly' Zhouyi have disappeared. This is because with a CSS design you can create a print stylesheet that is automatically invoked when you print a page. The Zhouyi pages have embedded page-break instructions for the printer so a hexagram will not be split. All the rest of the pages on this site also have an accompanying print stylesheet.