This blog has always had an RSS feed, but I linked to it incorrectly.  This made it hard for browsers to discover the feed.  Well, I just fixed that.  If you’re using Firefox, you should see the little orange “RSS” icon in the address bar.  Other news readers should have an easier time finding the RSS link as well.

In other news, the GUI updates are coming along quite nicely.  Drag N’ Drop is working, and the color picker is almost done.  Barring any unforseen disasters, the new GUI should be up within the next couple days.

I just want to post a quick note before I leave for the long weekend (in the US, it’s Memorial Day Weekend).

The updates are coming along nicely.  I have proof-of-concept code working for the drag-n-drop capability.  Also, I just got a nice color-picker prototype working.  (I should write an article about it…there are very few color-pickers on the web that actually let you do what I’ve done).  My plan is to let people customize the light and dark square colors.   I want people to be able to add some personality to their ChessUp diagrams, as opposed to all of them looking like the same cookie-cutter images.

I’m going to do zero coding for the next 5 days.  My goal is to get the updates out the first week of June.  Stay tuned, and have a good holiday.

OK, I decided to fix one last bug before I switch over to the new GUI, since this particular bug seemed to be so annoying.

In Interner Explorer, users were getting lots of “undefined” messages when they viewed the page for the first time.  This is because a cookie was not set properly.  I was able to replicate the problem.  After applying a fix, it seems to be gone.

Finding out your site is #1 when you search for its name in all the major search engines:

Google 

Yahoo!

Windows Live 

AOL 

I still don’t show up in Ask.com.

The bad news is that there are a couple annoying bugs that randomly appear in ChessUp. One of them causes the board to be slightly off-center when the page loads. Another causes lots of “undefined”’s to appear in the URL when you try to create an image.

The good news is that I’m not going to fix any of these bugs.

Why is that good news? Because I’m planning on updating the ChessUp GUI and making it better than ever.

Want drag and drop? It’s in the works.

Want some more graphic choices? They are coming.

The truth is that ChessUp is still an alpha product. Some gremlins are still in the system, some usability issues still need to be worked out. But it’s getting better and more robust every week.

My goal is for ChessUp to be the best online chess diagram creator on the web. I’m not there yet, but I have every intention of getting there…

The FEN problem in Internet Explorer has been fixed.  The problem was occuring when a user with IE reloaded the ChessUp GUI, and IE complained about an invalid FEN (which was stored in the cookie).

I’ve tested the FEN support in Firefox, Opera, and Internet Explorer 6 and everything seems to be OK now.

Looks like there is a problem with ChessUp in Internet Explorer.   It doesn’t like the “/” character in the FEN notation (because, y’know, a slash is a really special character.  Sigh).  I’ll post a note when I get this fixed.

(Yes, I should have tested this change in IE before I put the code up.  Lesson learned.)

ChessUp now supports FEN.

What is FEN? It’s a notation system for representing chess positions. There are 8 parts separated by a slash (/), and each part represents a row. Lower case letters are black pieces, upper case is white, and numbers are how many sequential empty squares there are.

The standard starting position in chess is:

rnbqkbnr/pppppppp/8/8/8/8/PPPPPPPP/RNBQKBNR

Of course, you don’t have to know any of this to use ChessUp. But if you do want to see what a FEN position looks like - or create a position and then get the FEN representation - you now have the ability.  Only position information is used.  Info about the game state is ignored.

I reorganized the pages of ChessUp.

The homepage now shows the Diagram Editor tool. My logs showed that a lot of users were hitting the front page, but not going any further. Instead of using the front page to tell people about ChessUp, I decided to actually show them the tool.

So we’ll see how that goes…

I think I’ve fixed the problem that was happening in Firefox.  When you loaded the “Create Diagram” page for the first time, clicking on the chess pieces in the palette had no effect (this was a Bad Thing).  I was able to consistently reproduce the problem before applying the fix.  After putting in the fix, I can’t recreate the problem anymore (this is a Good Thing).

For those who want the gory details: the problem seemed to a particularly nasty heisenbug that effected the x and y coordinates of the images.  As the page is rendered and starts to “settle”, the X and Y coordinates are in flux.  Unfortuneately, my JavaScript code that reads and stores the “golden copy” of the coordinates was running in the middle of this flux state.  End result: some important values were really wrong and that was causing a problem.