There was a bug where choosing “Black To Play” would make the diagram say “White To Play.”  The issue has been fixed.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

Some users are telling me that when they load the Create Diagram page in Firefox, nothing happens when they click on the pieces in the pallette.

I’ve been able to reproduce this problem. It seems like it usually happens when I open up Firefox and go directly to the “Create Diagram” page (it doesn’t happen if I go to the ChessUp home page and then go to the “Create Diagram” page).

A temporary solution is to refresh the page once or twice. Usually it will start working.

I’ll look into this problem and post the results here. Firefox’s JavaScript console doesn’t seem to indicate any problems, so I don’t know what’s wrong right now.

The “Chess Details” problem has been fixed. You now have the option of adding extra text that will show up in your diagram.

Here is an example of the details in action:

I discovered that ChessUp’s “Chess Details” options is not working correctly.   Or to be more blunt, it isn’t working at all.  Adding details will cause an error that prevents you from getting an image.

It looks like my webhost doesn’t have the same fonts as I had on my development machine.

For the time being, keep the “Chess Details” set to “Off”.  I will post an update when the problem is fixed.