How's My Formatting? (Sort of Logistical Update)

One thing that seems unfortunately common to chess related internet sites is that the formatting is really terrible. I dont want to really name anybody, but I have seen quite a few sites that have some great chess information but terrible formatting of that information. Some of these formatting troubles make the sites annoying to the point of being unusable.

I absolutely dont want my site to be like that. That is why I have nice big fonts. A lot of older people play chess, also, if a kid has good eyesight he would play baseball! I also make my diagrams big and fit the screen pretty well.

My color scheme may look a bit random, and it sort of is, but I tried to use warm, cozy/fuzzy colors. I would imagine a lot of adult chess players work in jobs where they stare at bright white computer screens a lot, and that really can hurt your eyes after a while. For me, it also gets annoying to look at sterile after sterile thing. Otherwise, I might use more of a black background, because I think that is easiest on the eyes. That feels a bit too cold though.

I like to think my writing is good, but I am sure it is not great. I consider bad writing a part of the format for a chess blog. The writing probably isnt why people visit chess blogs, it is the chess. So the writing should be sort of like an paddle. It is necessary and helpful to get down the river, but the river is the main attraction.

Anyway, the bottom line is that I am going to put this post in Topics under Questions to the Readers. If anyone has any comment to make about formatting, and I mean any comment at all, please write a comment about it. No comment will be considered too nitpicky! Comments along the lines of, "too much space between posts" or "dont use the word chess so much" or "in Post X, paragraph 3, second sentence has a comma in an incorrect spot" are fine!

It is somewhat sad to me to see so many chess sites on the internet with such great information that is passed over because of bad formatting. I want to do anything I can to help put this chess information in as user-friendly a format as possible. My .html abilities are pretty minimal, but I will try and learn whatever is necessary to correct whatever problems or concerns are brought up.

Thanks in advance for any comments you make on the site!

Logistical Update 3

As a reminder, these Logistical Updates do not contain any helpful chess information. They are just ways for me to explain parts of the blog, so if that does not interest you ignore this post.

Basically, I just wanted to say that I put up a bunch of Chess Tactics of the Day and attempted to make up for missing about 5 or 6 days because of the World Open. I kind of planned to Blog during the World Open, cause I thought semi Live blogging was a great idea. That didnt work at all though! I did post my first game one morning, but after that I was like Ugh. I didnt want to over do the chess stuff, and figured I would try and save my energy for the games. That didnt work out either though!

I will post my games with various comments. Because posting an entire game with comments takes a lot of time (See lack of US Chess Championship Posts), I am going to try posting my games in parts. This way, I can work through what I work through, post some stuff, and then try and get back to it as soon as possible. Rather than having a huge amount of work looming, and then have unfinished projects from months ago, this may be a good way to go. Anyway, it is worth trying out.

This also goes along with a bit of new philosophy I am going to try out about learning chess. That is more substantive though, so I wont talk about it in the Logistical Update.

See you later!

Oh wait, one last thing. I got real psyched today when I googled Smyslov the Slayer and noticed that 3 other websites had my name on it. There were just link dump sites I think, so it wasnt like anyone actually visited my blog yet. Haha, it was still pretty cool to know that people might accidentally stumble on my blog once or twice.

Logistical Update 2

Just wanted to publicly say thank you to How Can I Do That? and The Real Blogger Status for the helpful information they have about editing blogs.

Huge Huge Huge thanks to pgn4web. This is basically going to make my blog 100 times better, and it is fairly easy to use.

Finally, thanks to LT-PGN-VIEWER. I have no actually used the viewer, but they have a very easy to use PGN to FEN converter which will be very helpful to me.

Logistical Update 1

I just uploaded the Kamsky v Robson US Championship Game. I feel pretty good about that post, as far as quality goes. I plan to go back over the Stripunsky v Nakamura game and the Onischuk v. Benjamin game and bring them up to a similar quality. I am probably going to add more diagrams to all of my posts. It is a big pain to read the blog without them.

I have also figured out how to use the Labels function. As of now, I have two main categories of posts, US Chess Championship and Chess Openings. I hope to add more of these themed types of posts.

I am really hoping to cover the US Chess League, especially the Philadelphia Inventors. Truth be told, I always kind of forget about the League, but think it is a great idea, and hope to do reviews of as many of those games as possible. At the moment, I do not think there is a 2010 schedule yet. Please let me know if that is not the case!

Another thing I am going to try and do is add some more personal stuff, chess wise, dont worry! Though I have been really depressed recently. ;) (That's a joke)

Part of that will just be through the Chess Openings stuff, but I am also going to post up analysis of my tournament games, and maybe even some journalistic type stuff about the tournaments I go to. I dont go to a whole lot of tournaments, but I will be going to the World Open 2010, so I will probably try and cover that a bit.

Also, the Kamsky Robson game took me like 5 hours or more. I dont remember when I started. I am not sure if I will get faster at this stuff or what. As far as decisions go, though, I am going to cut breadth rather than depth. I did the Benjamin v. Onischuk post in maybe 2 or 3 hours, and the quality of is where I want it to be.

I might try to have a daily tactic post, or something small ish along those lines. That should be kind of fun, and relatively easy, as I can just take a problem out of some book I have!

As far as these rambling sorts of updates on what I plan to do, I am not sure how I am going to handle them. On the one hand, I am sure they are mildly annoying and get in the way of the chess stuff. On the other hand, I want to let people know what my plans are, and to take suggestions etc.

I guess for now I will call them Logistical Update 1, 2, 3 etc.

Then, if you see a Logistical Update post, you can ignore it if you dont care about all this stuff.

As a recap, this is what I plan to do in the near future:

1) US Chess Championship
2) US Chess League
3) World Open 2010
4) Chess Openings
5) Daily Puzzle

Bye bye

Viewing Convenience

I was looking over my last post, the game with Nakamura. I am working on the Kamsky Robson game and will try and do more as well.

As far as reading the blog, I found it was a little clunky and annoying, which obviously is not ideal. Hopefully, I will be able to fix some of the things in it, but for now, I have a recommended way of reading. It should minimize the awkward ness as much as possible.

First, right click on the link at the post.

Click on the option, Open in New Window.

The game should be open in chessgames.com now in a new window.

As you read through the post about the game, you can press Alt + Tab to switch from the Chessgames.com window and blog post.

Its not as good as diagrams, but it works pretty well for now.

U.S. Chess Championship 2010, Introduction

Well, I have a 1. Nf3 post in the making, but my computer broke so it is difficult for me to make posts with pictures etc. I dont think listing off a bunch of 1. Nf3 Nf6 2. c4 etc. etc. will be that helpful or interesting to read, so I am going to change gears for a bit. I do want to make posts that explore my openings more in depth though, so I will finish it at soon as possible. Hopefully my computer will be repaired in about 2 weeks or so.

Instead, I am going to do a series of posts about the U.S. Chess Championships. These posts will largely be me looking over the games, usually without computer analysis, and seeing what I can come up with. It will not be so much in depth and accurate analysis, as it will be exploring what a Class A player can come up with in his brain. Perhaps after a run through without computer analysis, I might double check whatever I come up with, we will have to see.

The other idea behind these posts is to help promote the US Chess Championships, as one of my goals of this blog is to promote chess in the US.

I will leave this post largely as an Introduction sort of Post, and the other posts in this hopefully long and interesting series will be titled "U.S. Chess Championship: ______ v. ______"

Unfortunately, as I said earlier, my computer broke so I am unable to make posts with pictures. Instead, I will be linking to chessgames.com for the games, and will assume that anyone reading my post has the game opened up on that page and can easily go through the various moves. Hopefully, that is not too clunky or inconvenient.

[Edit: A lot of this is moot now, but I will leave it up as a testament to my ability to improve!]