chrss blog

I've just put up a small update for chrss. Nothing too major - just a bit of javascript to make one small corner of the app faster/easier to use. You might not even notice the change.

There's also the start of a "history" feature to let you see how you've faired in previous games. I'm using the Google Chart API to display a small chart of the percentage change in wins, draws and losses over time, as well as showing the data in tabular form (for those that aren't such a fan of charts). It's not yet linked in and for people with a lot of finished games (e.g. me) the chart won't show up. I need to reduce the number of points displayed, as there's a limit on the total number that can be displayed.

If you want to have a sneak peek, just add /history onto the end of your profile URL.

e.g. http://chrss.co.uk/user/USERNAME/history

I'll work on getting it functioning properly for everyone in the near future.

In other news I might not be making too many moves in my chess game for the next couple of weeks, as I will be on my honeymoon.

Just thought a few of you might like to read My Obsession With Chess by Scott McCloud.

I personally never got into chess to that extent. Apart from playing games with friends and my dad occasionally when growing up I only really got a little past knowing the rules and some basic tactics. In fact for a while I lost any interest in chess at all, but I always felt like chess was something that I should be good at. So after starting to play a few games with my friend Ian again, I decided that it was time to start learning chess properly.

Rather than reading books and studying I figured the best way to learn was to actually play games. The trouble being that spending an hour or two on a chess game seemed like quite a luxury. So instead I decided to combine chess my main obsession - programming. Hence Chrss was born.

Now two years later I've played (and finished) over 200 games - nearly one a week. Whilst I'm definitely not the best player I feel that I've definitely improved a lot. The correspondence-style of play also works really nicely for me, as I can fit in several games of chess around everything else.

I look forward to continuing to play many more games of chess in the coming years.

Just a quick note to say I have finally sorted out the active games issue. So now games that your opponent has not moved in for 30 days or more should now no longer appear in the "active" list. This also sorts out the active games drop-down ordering - which had gone a little funny too.

As is usual with this sort of bug it was a simple one line fix. Just needed to sit down and have a proper look.

It seems like it might be worth me enumerating the different ways to access you games here. It's something that seems obvious to me, but then I wrote it...

When logged in:

• Click "games" in the top-right to go to a list of your active games (from there you can see inactive and finished games too).
• If you see a number in brackets, e.g. "(3)", next to "games" you can click on that to get a little drop-down of the games it is your turn to move in (handy if you are playing several games and want to quickly move between them).
• Lastly if you go to the home page you will see a list of what would be in your RSS feed (a list of moves and comments), from which you can then access games where a move has happened.

About two months ago I posted a screencast of a new feature, that would be arriving soon. Well I've been a little busy, but have finally managed to get enough time together to finish the feature off and make it available to everyone.

So now you will see an "allow undo" button next to your opponents move. This can be used to offer your opponent a chance to take back their move. It's very much self-policing and at the end of the day you don't have to let anyone undo a move if you don't want to. However I'm sure everyone has had the odd game where a silly mistake has cut short an otherwise enjoyable game.

As I said in the previous post I (personally) have had this feature enabled on my account for a little while. I noticed quite a few little issues and usability quirks (e.g. how do you know when your opponent is offering you a chance to undo a move?), which I've spent a bit more time sorting out now.

So hopefully everyone will find this feature (at least occasionally) useful. Let me know if you have any suggestions on how to improve it (or feedback in general).

John (aka lilspikey)

I've just uploaded a new version of chrss. The new features are as follows:

• Javascript helper for OpenID logins - drop-down for common openid providers
• The offer of a draw is now recorded (even if it is declined)
• Game creation now shows preview of the board and is hopefully a bit friendlier to use
• The javascript games drop-down now sorts by update time
• Undo/take-back

Now the last feature is a pretty big one, so I'm being cautious about it. Being able to undo a move in a game of chess has many implications. I know some players will find that this breaks the whole idea of J'Adoube (the touch-move rule), but also others will find it useful to avoid ruining an otherwise good game.

As chrss is not a competitive site, I think that the ability to undo a move will be a boon. Often when playing a game of chess against a friend you might offer them the chance to take a move back. e.g. if it would clearly end the game early. This sort of decision is shared by both of the players and requires both of their consent.

Therefore to undo a move in chrss it works like this:

• Player 1 makes their move
• Player 2 decides that Player 1 should be allowed to undo their move and presses the "allow undo" button
• Player 1 will now see an "undo" button and can undo their last move
• The undone move will then show up as being crossed out, so it is obvious a move has been taken back

If Player 2 decides to make a move before Player 1 undoes their move then the "allow undo" will be cancelled.

At the moment though the "allow undo" button is only available to the admin account. I've done this just to make sure that everything works ok. I've done a fair bit of testing, but as undo allows the board to change out of sequence I want to make sure there aren't any unintended consequences, before rolling this out to everyone. Hopefully that will be in the next couple of weeks.

So if you are playing a game against me you can ask to undo a move if you suddenly realize you've made a foolish error!

Another minor update.

Firstly there are now better 404 and error pages. Previously they were fairly unfriendly server error styles pages. Now they look like they belong to the site. Not a major thing at all, but it's been bugging me since I started chrss two years ago.

The real thing of interest though is that I've added an extra style sheet for iPhone (and in principle Android) users. It simply tweaks the main style sheet to make the site work a bit better on the iPhone's small screen (relative to a desktop/laptop at least). This means that the chess board for a game should be nice and big on the iPhone's screen so you can see what's going on.

The one minor caveat though is that I've only tested this on the iPhone simulator (I'm a bit of a luddite when it comes to phones). However as it's only making small changes it should work ok.

So hopefully for the few people currently using an iPhone to access chrss their user experience will now be a good deal better.

Well chrss has just passed a little milestone - we've reached one thousand games! Not bad for a hobby site.

So if anyone would care to join me I'm waiting in game #1000.

Here's to the next 1000 games!

Another few small changes:

• Finished games show in a non-bold font-face in the games drop-down (so you can tell them apart from ongoing games)
• The items in your RSS feed are now visible from the home page of the site when you are logged in (helps to avoid missing comments)
• Each user now has a personal "stats" page that shows them how many games they've won/draw/lost and against who

The feed on the front page is useful, because it is sorted in date order. Newer moves and comments are at the top.

The stats page is a concession towards everyone's competitive urges. I've toyed with the idea of a site-wide leader board, but that'd encourage a lot more (over-)competitiveness and thus cheating. Sticking with the "friendly game of chess" approach I'm keen to avoid such problems. However it's always fun to be a little competitive with your friends, so being able to track your games seemed like a reasonable compromise.

As you can see from my stats page I'm only winning about a third of my games. So now you know I'm not joking when I say on my profile page that I'm "not that good at chess"!

I've just made a small change to your games list. It used to be that once a game finished it would disappear straight away from the "active" list and go to the "finished" list. Sometimes though you haven't had a chance to review the game and possibly leave a friendly comment. So now instead of this, finished games will stay on the active list for two days after the game has finished, which should be ample time.

Only a small change, but hopefully the start of a few more. I'd planned to do a fair bit on chrss over the holidays, but got sidetracked by the 5K App.

Just a quick post to say that the mobile version of chrss now works properly with the Nokia 6300 built-in browser. This happens to be the phone I have and it's very much a phone (not a web-browsing device), so the mobile version is mostly for when I'm not at a computer and want to check my games and maybe make a move. I'd been using Opera Mini to access the mobile version before, but hadn't quite figured out why the native browser wasn't working.

For those who might want to know of one of the quirks of this browser (and it will be more or less the same for similar Nokia Series 40 phones) it appears that if you issue a (302) redirect after a post request then the browser re-posts the data to the redirect URL. So in chrss when logging in it was doing this:

• POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/login
• 302 Redirect sent to go to /mob/ after info confirmed
• POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/

Whereas a regular browser would do this:

• POST login info (user and pwd) to /mob/login
• 302 Redirect sent to go to /mob/ after info confirmed
• GET /mob/

As this meant there were some unexpected parameters Turbogears was throwing an exception. As a workaround I've changed my mobile login code to remove the user and pwd params before they cause any trouble.

In the end a simple fix, but as always testing things out an a real phone make things take a good while longer than I'd like.