VIdeo - New Blog - Daily Chess Tactics from Most Recent Top Tournaments

http://chesspublisher.blogspot.com will help chessplayers to develop combination solving ability on a daily basis. The puzzles appear daily and you can take you time to figure out the solution and then see the answer by clicking on the question mark. You can also have these puzzles appear in your RSS reader by subscribing to the Daily Chess Tactics feed or you can follow it by email. Also available in Kindle format - http://goo.gl/D32wg0. More details also at http://roman-chess.blogspot.ca/2016/02/subscribe-to-new-blog-daily-chess.html .

Subscribe to New Blog - Daily Chess Tactics

To build practical strength and simply to have fun, a chessplayer needs constant practice in their tactical skills. If you want to practice your combination solving ability on a daily basis, you might want to know that I started maintaining a new blog at http://chesspublisher.blogspot.com. The puzzles appear daily and you can take you time to figure out the solution and then see the answer by clicking on the question mark. You can also have these puzzles appear in your RSS reader by subscribing to the Daily Chess Tactics feed. Please let me know if you have any feedback!

 

Click on the blue spot to see the answer.

There is already an archive for the last two months, and you can see the last 3 puzzles in this roman-chess blog in the top right corner:

 

Three Hundred

I made three hundred posts on this blog in the past 4 years. The blog is definitely helping me to keep my interest in chess going, so as long as I am interested in chess, I will probably keep making little notes on the web in one form or another.

This is also a good time to summarize categories of posts (and I must admit some of 300 posts did not make it beyond drafts): there is quite a few posts about opening preparation, endgame, quite a few posts are positions that I think are good for solving. Other stuff is analysis of my own games  and games of grandmasters. The rest is either about chess-related software, videos I make on my youtube channel and book reviews. So if you are interested in improving your game, chess software and chess books, hopefully there is something for you read on my blog.

My New Russian Chess Blog

My chess blog does have an audience from Russia, although a small percentage (see the stats for the past year). With hopes to increase that, as well as improve my writing skills in mother tongue, I figured I’d start a Chess Blog in Russian. For now it has very few entries, but more will come over time as often I want to share links to chess resources in Russian that would not make sense to post on the English Blog – so now I can post them on my Russian blog.

My Russian blog URL: http://shakhmatist.blogspot.com/

My Russian Chess Blog

Windows Live Writer - Backing up your Chess Blog

This post is of course not only relevant to a chess blog, but to any blog that is created with Windows Live Writer (I use 2009 version). Following my several computer disasters in the last couple of years, I have been a bit more diligent about backups, and Windows Live Writer Backup tool is part of the routine; Windows Live Writer backup is a very simple tool that lets you export most of your Blog data into a single file. I have once had to do a restore, and it worked pretty well.

Just run the tool and press Backup (you might have to run it as an administrator).

As an added benefit, it lets me monitor how my blog grows in size over time (also indicates why my blog takes so long to load on slow connection)

On that note – here is a quick tutorial on how to use Windows Live Writer to add chess content, such as diagrams, to your posts.

In this video I show how to insert chess diagrams to your blog post with only a couple of quick shortcuts. This how-to video assumes that you already have Chess Base Light 2009 and Windows Live Writer installed . Both are free tools from ChessBase and Microsoft respectively. You'd need to have a blog setup already as well. The post I made in the video is here.

Blog structure - reorganizing the labels

After realizing that labels, the way I use them, are not helping viewers to find things on the blog, I went through some effort to reorganize them and make better use of the blogger ‘labels’ widget. Blogger makes it difficult to rename labels, so I regretted a little bit that I had not put more effort into this earlier, but now what’s done is done. As of today have major label categories for
- openings
- players
- endgames
- other categories that don’t fall under any of the above

 

Now, what labels do I need to attach to this post...

Added "Replay Game" link - using powershell

Now every post under "Annotated Game" label is going to have a link to a separate page where you can replay through the game in the Palview viewer. Unfortunately Blogger does not allow javascript to be embedded into posts, so I have to generate one palview page with only diagrams, but no replay option, and then another palview html page with replay buttons, which gets uploaded to a separate site via FTP. I already had a way to automate the annoying process of creating two slightly different pages, but running some FTP GUI-ish tool to upload a single file every time I just want to post a couple of diagrams to the blog was too much for my lazy nature so I just stopped bothering generating re-playable pages ... until now! I used this FTP powershell script and finally even the FTP upload step is automated - one click creates both pages, uploads the static palview diagrams to the blog post via Google Blogger API, and a dynamic page to my FTP site. The process is somewhat fragile though, so I am still to see how well all this works over time. And yes, I still can't decide if I primarily created this blog so that I can post chess games, or just to be able to hack around with my little scripts.