Chess eBooks now available for download

Thanks to Everyman Chess I have been able to make chess eBooks available for purchase on this site. Currently 4 titles available, but I will be building the stock rapidly over the next few days. Purchasing is through Google Cart or PayPal which in itself presented a few interesting technical challenges.

• buy Chess eBooks

Protected: 4NCL 08/09 Final Weekend, Staverton Park, Daventry

4NCL 08/09 Final Weekend: Qik Blitz at the Barcelo

I like any technology that saves time and makes things easy for the layman. Qik is a very handy software for your mobile device, that connects directly with your in-built video recorder and your online Qik account. Launch the software, press one button and you are streaming live to the web. All you need is a data-plan with decent connection and video-enabled phone. There is a big expanding list of compatible phones on the Qik website. I used a HTC Touch Pro, Windows Mobile 6.1. Despite a slow OS and other drawbacks, the video works nicely and the vodafone HSDPA connection seems more than enough in every location I have tried.

Here are a couple of blitz chess games from a recent 4NCL chess weekend, played over beers in our team hotel. It’s worth noting that two of the players are pretty formidable. GM Keith Arkell was runner up in the British championship this year and has a fearsome blitz reputation, whilst Simon Williams is one of the UK’s top 10 rated Grandmasters, higher than Keith. Shame about the camera-work, am still learning .

Naylor versus Arkell

Rice versus Williams

Choosing the right chess viewer for your blog

It’s been a long time since I have looked for a chess viewer to put on a website. The last time I tried was November 2000 for the BrainGames World Championship between Kramnik and Kasparov: http://www.chesscenter.com/wcc2000/. Yes this was my work (mostly) and it still functions except for the ads provided by Vavo-dot-com (evidently now a ‘cyber-squatted’ url), one of the many victims of the original dotcom crash in 2001. At that time I used ChessBase7 and was saving directly to the web to cover games live and our traffic brought the vavo servers to their knees. The auto-refresh was downloading all the chess-piece images every time and no caching was going on, so in order to manage traffic a little the playthrough was moved one level down and a static board image together with the moves and commentary was kept on the live page. It was all rather primitive, but it worked when the servers were up and was very popular.

I digress, so more than 8 years later, how far have things moved on? Well, ChessBase is now up to version10 and has an export to web facility and there are still a number of applets out there + now Flash and Silverlight offerings. Should be easy to put something on a wordpress template right? Wrong: at least in my case.

Here are my criteria, not necessarily in order of importance:

1. Reads pgn: basic requirement, ideally pgn from any location, no just local
2. Cross-platform/browser compatible: i.e. you shouldn’t really need to be installing extra software on your server and yes it should work normally in the main browsers (ie6+, ff2+,Safari2+,Chrome, Opera)
3. Supports multiple-games/databases: should have a graceful way of handling files with more than one game and even better if it handles more than one files gracefully
4. Supports annotations: even better if it supports inline annotation and analysis, this is a desirable as opposed to must-have
5. Easily configured: no messing about, I want to get my settings sorted out and then stick to them with minimum change effort for each new use: would it be easy to make a WP plugin
6. Configurability: it needs to work with my blog template inside the content panel which is 600px, I also want the appearance, typefaces, colours to be in line with my theme: this is important
7. Price/availability: preferably free with an open license
8. Live updates: checks pgn files for changes and updates onChange or 2nd best periodically updates whether or not the pgn has changed
9. Performance: works smoothly with minimum lag
10. Keyboard support: this is nice usability (and accessibility) , better than click buttons with your mouse, you should be able to flick back and forth with the arrows

Viewer	Technology	1	2	3	4	5	6	7	8	9	10	Overall
Chessviewer	Java Applet
ChessBase	Javascript
DGT	Flash
PGN World Viewer	Java Applet
SilverlightBoard	Silverlight

Protected: 4NCL Barcelo Hotel, Hinckley