A new overview

An overview of Chess Publishing methods has been published before, but this overview didn't include the ChessFlash PGN viewer of one of the previous posts.
In addition some of the previously discussed Chess Publishing methods just disappeared, which emphasizes the importance of one of the original requirements that it should not be dependent on another site.

Now let's first concentrate on the ChessFlash PGN viewer.

  • It offers a chess board that shows the position after each move
  • The moves are also shown
  • Clicking on a move shows the position on the board after this move
  • It doesn't offer autoplay
  • Variations in the moves are possible
  • It can deal with comments, but the comment at the start of a variation seems to be shown as belonging at the end of the previous move
  • There is a kind of puzzle mode, but this doesn't show the moves after the right answer is given
  • It is based on entering PGN
  • I think that it is not necessary to copy and paste all kind of code. The Quick Publisher can be seen as an additional nice tool. The original requirement "Without the need to copy and paste all kind of code" is probably met
  • It seems to depend on another site, but it will also be possible to host the player on your own site and a site like Google sites will do. However it will not be possible to limit ourselves to the Blogspot/Picasa combination.
  • It loads rather slow, especially when you publish more chess games on the same page like you may frequently do on a blog-site). This can partly be solved by means of a show/hide wrapper, but I don't like to hide the content of my posts
  • A separate PGN viewer is loaded for each chess game.
  • It doesn't really feel integrated and the moves are always shown at the right side or below the board, but not around the chess board.
  • The height and width is configurable, but the scrollbar at the right side remains.
So I think that the ChessFlash PGN viewer is a nice addition and I consider it as being better than Chesspublisher and Chesspastebin and the Chess Viewer Applet, but I still prefer the LT-PGN Editor and Viewer and certainly our own Blogspot Game Viewer, that has become a lot easier to use without the need for adding the coded moves.
Of course there may be other requirements (like selecting another chess set or board image) and some of the requirements above may not be important for your site so the order of chess game viewers may be different for you. It's rather easy to test them for yourself. Please share your findings in the comments.

  • Do you know i there is any chess viewing device that works on Facebook?

    I've been thinking about starting a chessblog of my own, but maybe a facebook group is a better idea, as then you'd know more about your readers.

    Does blogger.com offer any statistics on the visitors/readers by the way?

  • This is fascinating stuff but I'm afraid it's a little ove rmy head.
    Can you tell me how to transfer a game with annotations and a playable chessboard from Chessbase 9 to a blog?
    I know to right-click on the game in the games list, choose output in the menu and click on HTML + Java Script. This brings up a window, but what do I do then?
    Many thanks.

  • @Cashisking
    As far as I know Blogger doesn't offer statistics, but you can always use analytics

  • @Tim Spanton
    It will be very difficult (or even impossible) to use the HTML and JavaScript generated by Chessbase on a blogsite like blogger.
    That's one of the reasons why I started this search for other chess publishing methods and in the end decided to create the Blogspot Chess Game Viewer.

  • For those who host their own wordpress site, I've written a plugin which makes it very easy to use Chessflash on your site. You can then just copy-paste games from chessbase into your posts. Only thing to do is put [pgn] [/pgn] tags around the game-data.

    See:
    WP-ChessFlash

  • "...especially when you publish more chess games on the same page like you may frequently do on a blog-site."

    That's a very good point. Recently, I had some hard time explaining it to a fellow blogger. (comments after Friday chess tactic) He clearly didn’t understand the importance of archive mode (Archive: April 2009) and just opted to ignore it. I think the only way to compare various viewers’ behavior under such conditions is to create working test pages (e.g. 40 instances of CVD on mine) and invite people to visit them. After that, paying attention to CPU and memory usage, we can judge for ourselves.