Psychic Origami

Another update to chrss.

• tweaked front page layout to make it clearer and show different options depending on if you are logged in or not
• addition of a help section (with backend CMS for myself to add content to it).

At the moment the help section is not directly linked from the front page of chrss. I need to get some more content in there and figure out where best to link it.

• Updated the user registration process, so hopefully it’s a bit friendlier
• Users now have a chance to resend their activation email if they have trouble activating their account
• Tweaked filters for games on user’s page:
  • “active” - games that it’s your turn in or have had a move in the last 30 days
  • “waiting” - un-finished games that aren’t active
  • “finished”
  • “all”

Also improved the code coverage some more.

On a side note there is a preliminary mobile version of chrss available now. However I wouldn’t recommend it for regular use, as making a move currently involves a _huge_ drop down menu. Less than ideal. Still it can be handy for checking whether anyone has move. I’ve got some plans on improving the usability in the future, so check back later to see how it’s doing.

• Bug fix for PGN (Portable Game Notation) output (as noted by Calibius)
• Faster PGN generation (evaluating only the legal moves I need to consider to avoid ambiguity, rather than _all_ legal moves)
• URLs in comments should now automatically appear as click-able links
• Ability to “rotate” the board, to view it from the other direction (handy when you’re playing black)

• simple bread crumbs added to aid navigation:
  

• highlighting games that it’s your turn to move in:
  

• PGN (portable game notation) output for games:
  

• improved test coverage

This update adds two features:

• you can now offer a draw to an opponent
• comments are now included in rss feeds for games and users

The first new feature was needed so I could finish this game. A bit like when I had to add the ability to resign a game. That’s probably the last major missing feature added. I could add code for detecting threefold repetition or the fifty move rule, but that seemed overkill for what I have in mind for chrss. After all it’s meant to be for playing friendly games of correspondence chess - so agreeing whether to draw a game should not be a problem.

I also figured that adding comments to the rss feeds might be nice. With a game like chess, moves can be few and far between, so making the rss feeds a bit more active might be quite good. It also means you can nudge your opponent - as leaving a comment will show up in their feed reader and might well serve to remind them it’s their turn to play!

I’ve still got PGN in mind for my next feature. I imagine I’ll need to spend a bit of time to make sure that the exported PGN files will work with other chess programs.

Chess Enlightenment at xkcd.

Well I ended up not doing so well against Kennon in the end.

To be able to finish the game though I needed to add the ability to resign from a game. So now when you are logged in you will see a “resign” button (if it’s your turn to move). You’ll get a javascript confirmation dialog (to make sure you didn’t press it by accident) and then that’s it - your opponent wins.

Couple of other minor things added, so total new features/fixes as follows:

• can now resign from games
• stalemate now being checked for
• the final result of a game now appears in the rss feed

Well game #2 is in the end game now. It’s been really good playing against Kennon. Must say that I’m not faring terribly well, but it’s not over yet…

Over Christmas and evenings in January I’ve been working on a side project: chrss.

It’s a correspondence chess web application. There are plenty of options for playing chess online (whether in realtime or via correspondence), but I felt the urge to “roll my own”. This was a large part due to me wanting a small project to use Turbogears with and this fitted the bill perfectly.

Development was also further spurred on by starting to play chess again with my friend Ian.

Currently it’s fairly minimal, but functionally complete. You can create user accounts (which was pretty easy to implement using identity management in Turbogears), create new games, invite other people to join a game and play games. To top it all off you can then subscribe to a game’s moves via rss, so you don’t have to constantly check the site to see if someone has moved.

Hopefully I’ll add new features as I go. There’s a few I’ve got in mind already, which should be quite nice. First though I need to make sure that everything so far is working properly (there are a few little niggles that occurred from running chrss from “chrss/” rather than “/” , which I didn’t notice when developing).