Cool.  Bruce Pandolfini has linked to me in his January 24th column at ChessCafe.

For those new to the site, the tool is on the front page.  Here are some instructions for using it.

I have a policy on hotlinking.  I’m pretty much OK with it, but please give credit to my site in the form of a link.

I hope you enjoy ChessUp.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, I know it’s the end of January, but saying “Happy New Year” during the first week of the year is so…predictable.  Besides, this is the time of year when you need a happy message the most.

The PC that I used to create ChessUp decided that it did not want to live to see 2007.  All the source code is saved, I just need to rebuild everything on the machine.  I’d like to make this blog a little easier to read.  (What the heck was I thinking when I put a striped-background directly behind the text?)

The forums continue to be a frustrating point for me.  It is very difficult to build a community and fight a wave of spammers simultaneously.  I need to re-vamp all the anti-spam measures on this site.  My feedback email inbox is flooded with spam, too, and so are my blog trackbacks.  It can be fixed, I just need to sit myself down one evening and do it.

If you sent me a message recently, I probably missed it.  If you want to contact me, the best way is to email:

spaceNOSPAMrook[at]gmail[dot]com

(Remove the NOSPAM and replace [at] with @ and [dot] with .)

Hope to hear from you.

Browsing my website logs, I’ve noticed that some ChessUp users have been hotlinking to my images from their forums / blogs.

In general, I am fine with this.  Hey, you guys like the tool…I’d be crazy to complain about that.  All I ask is that you be kind and post a little link on your webpage to my humble site.

But I do have 2 point that I think everyone should be aware of:

1) If you run a forum and users are able to post links to scripts on other websites, that is a pretty big security violation.  You can trust me…but what about some other site where a guy has embedded a malicious PHP script?  This is one of the reasons I created the ChessUp Forums.  Users can link to my image creation script, but ONLY when the script is coming from my own site.

2) I reserve the right to embed a text link to my site in images if they are hotlinked.  It will not be ugly and surely won’t be as intrusive as a watermark, but it will probably just be some small text at the bottom of the image that says “http://chessup.net”.  If you want to avoid that, you can always download the image that you create with ChessUp and host it on your own servers.

Cliff Notes Version of this post: I’m not against hotlinking, but please provide credit somewhere on your blog if you are going to use my bandwidth.  Additionally, I may put a text link in hotlinked images.  And be sure your forums are secure.

ChessUp now has forums!

The forums are open to everyone. Categories include general chess talk, puzzles, and ChessUp’s chess diagram tool. (Who knows, there might even be more forums added in the near future…)

So, the $24,000 question: can you post ChessUp diagrams in the forums?

Of course! And it’s pretty simple, too. You don’t even need to download the image.

So stop on over and say “hi”. While you’re there, why not register and take our first poll? It is voting season, after all.

See you in the forums…

UPDATE: I’ve added an unregistered forum. Anyone can go there and post messages without registering. Why not go take the poll?

In the spirit of Halloween and dressing-up, I created a new style for the ChessUp website today. No, it’s not scary and has nothing to do with Halloween…but then again, those kids that dress up like football players don’t really have much to do with Halloween, either, now do they?

The header graphic came out way better than I expected. I found a nice stock footage image of a king piece and then built the rest of the header around it. I also replaced the website’s background pattern with a new one.

I tested the re-design in Firefox and Internet Explorer 6.  I didn’t notice any problems, but please let me know if you do.

I have another big addition to this website in the works. Stay tuned…

I disabled the comments for ChessUp.  I hate that I had to do that.  Nothing seems more self-centered than a blog without the ability to post comments.

But the spam was getting to be annoying.

I despise spammers.  I hate what they do to my email inbox.  I hate what they do to my webpages.  I hate what they do to perfectly good domain names.

If you would like to contact me, I would love to hear from you.  The About/Contact page has a way to contact me.

A ChessUp user sent me some feedback asking about pre-defined color styles.  (Style = square/text/background colors).  I think this is a great idea.
Of course, now I actually have to come up with some pretty styles.

If anyone has any suggestions, leave them in the comments or send me some feedback.  I’ll try to come up with some on my own.  Also, give your style a descriptive name.

If you need some inspiration, be sure to check out the gallery.

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

Just a simple update: I added algebraic chess coordinates to the side of the chessboard on the main interface. So, now users see the letters “a-h” running along the bottom of the board, and the numbers “1-8″ running along the left side.

For users running in an 800×600 resolution, you’ll probably get a horizontal scroll bar now.  I tried to avoid this for as long as possible, but I simply needed more width.  I recommend running your system in at least a 1024×768 screen resolution for best results in all programs, not just ChessUp.

I updated the Help page.  Actually, it’s more accurate to say that I added the Help page, since there was practically nothing there to begin with.

I also added a Gallery to show off the wide range of diagrams that ChessUp can create.