Chess publisher downtime and alternative
When posting earlier today, I noticed that none of the games were showing up on the blog. Apparently chesspublisher.com is suffering some sort of downtime. I guess this was always a risk for a blog relying on a third party to host its games.
This prompted me to start looking into alternative methods for getting chess games onto the blog. I fairly quickly found the free LT PGN viewer - and fairly quickly realised that ChessPublisher appeared to be based on that work. (I can't remember whether ChessPublisher gave appropriate credit for this or not; and can't check while the site remains down).
Then I figured out that I could use Google's servers (explicitly, Google pages) to host something more or less equivalent to ChessPublisher.
So, after some fiddling, I'm proud to present Barnet Elizabethans' Chess Club's very own PGN publisher, here. Much as in ChessPublisher, you enter your PGN and are given an HTML snippet to put into your blog.
In a sense, of course, this is no step forward. Bloggers are still relying on a third-party host to take care of displaying their games. Indeed, if you have your own server space then you probably should be using that. However, if you must go elsewhere, my guess is that (except, perhaps, when Pakistan intervenes) the Google servers should be more reliable than most.
I've edited this post to use our version of the PGN viewer, so you can see what the results looks like.
This prompted me to start looking into alternative methods for getting chess games onto the blog. I fairly quickly found the free LT PGN viewer - and fairly quickly realised that ChessPublisher appeared to be based on that work. (I can't remember whether ChessPublisher gave appropriate credit for this or not; and can't check while the site remains down).
Then I figured out that I could use Google's servers (explicitly, Google pages) to host something more or less equivalent to ChessPublisher.
So, after some fiddling, I'm proud to present Barnet Elizabethans' Chess Club's very own PGN publisher, here. Much as in ChessPublisher, you enter your PGN and are given an HTML snippet to put into your blog.
In a sense, of course, this is no step forward. Bloggers are still relying on a third-party host to take care of displaying their games. Indeed, if you have your own server space then you probably should be using that. However, if you must go elsewhere, my guess is that (except, perhaps, when Pakistan intervenes) the Google servers should be more reliable than most.
I've edited this post to use our version of the PGN viewer, so you can see what the results looks like.
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