From: "World Chess Championship", INTERNET:newsletter@mark-weeks.com Date: 00/04/15, 13:08 Re: Chess History on the Web (2000 no.8) The next review, starting the second pass through the Chess History bookmarks, is for About.com's Chess History by David Dunbar. About.com, previously known as the Mining Company, is primarily a directory. I suppose that the name was changed to avoid confusing data mines with gold & copper mines and to profit from the Dot.Com stock market mania. The list of 14 links related to chess history is at... http://chess.about.com/games/chess/msub30.htm ...The history section is one of 26 About.com 'Subjects' which are related to chess. The high level address for chess is... http://chess.about.com/games/chess/mbody.htm ...which logically places chess in the hierarchy 'About.com > Games > Chess'. In addition to the subject categories, there are general interest articles posted twice a month. One recent article related to chess history is titled 'The Greatest Chess Games Ever Played' and features 64 games playable through a Javascript browser. The home page for chess also hosts a forum, which looks very active; a newsletter, where I couldn't find any archive of previous issues; a search function, which returned 32 documents against a search on 'history'; and an archive of opinion polls. The first poll asks about 'matches that should have taken place but didn't -- events that were cancelled, avoided, or permanently postponed and so will remain forever in the minds of chess fans as unanswered question marks'. Of the five choices, Fischer vs. Karpov currently leads with 107 of 166 total votes. Some of the other chess subjects are also related to the subject of chess history. [Databases] has links to 'Commercial' & 'Free Databases and Utilities' such as Chesslab & the UPITT Archives. [Players] covers mainly contemporary players, although Marcel Duchamp makes the list. Current & past world champions are covered by [World Champions], while events from 1998-1999 are covered by [Tournaments]. The difference between About.com & most other directories, like Yahoo, is that the administrators ('guides' in About.com parlance) are visible & identified personalities. The biography for Dunbar, who is the guide for all of the About.com chess subjects, says, 'David Dunbar is a chess enthusiast who has a day job working for the Canadian government as a lawyer.' Before Dunbar, the guide was Sean Whalen. A routine search of the Web shows that Whalen's name is still associated with the site in many other lists of chess links. I couldn't find an independent site maintained by Whalen. In my last review, I dismissed four general directories -- LookSmart, Open Directory, Snap, & Yahoo -- with the comment that 'None of the four impressed me very much concerning chess history.' About.com is an exception. Its list of chess sites is just as good as other directories which are specific to chess. I don't know where anyone finds the time or the energy to maintain chess specific directories, although I'm certainly glad that they do. I have trouble maintaining the ~25 bookmarks for the Chess History discussion group. Web sites are constantly appearing, changing addresses, & disappearing. Many sites have multiple addresses pointing to the same pages. I usually find out about changes by accident. An AltaVista search on 'chess' returns 'about 420,555 pages found', as well as 'Shopping: 729 results for chess'. The phrase 'chess AND history' returns 'about 84,575 pages found'. How one sifts through all of this to build a list of 1000-2000 sites is a mystery to me. How one maintains the list is an even greater mystery. Segmenting the links by category must be another thankless task. I suppose that directory administrators hope that site owners or other interested users will report any changes. This is doomed as a workable strategy. Speaking as a site owner, I have better things to do than sending email to directory administrators, especially considering that most of the efforts I've made in the past for this sort of thing have been ignored. About.com's chess topic is one of the few chess specific directories to have a subtopic devoted to chess history. I first mentioned it, along with several of its linked sites, in August 1999. I don't believe that the list of sites has changed since that time. In fact, I doubt that any of Dunbar's chess lists are maintained regularly. The 'World Champions' subject lists two Web addresses which I maintained in the past, both of which are now obsolete. One returns a 'Page Not Found' error message, which an automated link checker would have picked up by now. The other is redirected. I had intended to discuss chess specific directories in this review, but there is too much material to cover, so I'll come back to it in the future. Let's take a look instead at the sites which Dunbar has categorized as chess history. Unfortunately, there is a small problem to be overcome. The links open in an About.com frame, a technique I've never liked. Its big drawback is that it reduces the available page viewing space, which is already small enough, in the browser. The frame adds nothing but an unwanted ad to the content of the target site, gives the impression that all sites are somehow associated with About.com, and assumes that visitors won't find their way back to About.com. A lesser evil would be to open the target site in a new window. To overcome About.com's restricted viewing space, I accessed the sites by copying & pasting the links into my browser. Dunbar's 14 sites are:- - Automaton Chess (3) - Battle Royale (1) - Brief History of Chess (1) - Chess Archaeology (2) - Chess History [Bill Wall] (2) - ChessMate.com: Rare Chess History Books (1) - Computer Chess History (3) - Deja News: Chess History (2) - Morals of Chess (1) - On the Origin of Chess [Josten] (2) - Origin of Chess [Sloan] (2) - Today in Chess History (1) - US Chess History (2) - Weinheimer, Jim (1) In this review I'll look at the six sites marked (1). Sites marked (2) are already covered by the bookmarks for the Chess History discussion group & were the subject of previous reviews. 'Deja News: Chess History' is the discussion group itself; I appreciate the mention. Sites marked (3) are not accessible. 'Automaton Chess' has a new address at http://www.cowderoy.com/graphics/ac.htm, which is already a discussion group bookmark & will be reviewed sometime in the next few months. 'Computer Chess History' returns an error message 'The server does not have a DNS entry' -- I couldn't find the page anywhere else on the Web. --- Battle Royale by Steve Lopez http://www.chessbaseusa.com/NY1924/ny1924.htm This impressive site covers the 1924 New York International Chess Tournament, an event which is on most lists of the greatest chess tournaments of all time. It's a mixture of fact (the moves of the games) and fiction (the introductions to the rounds & games), which is being serialized. 'This week's installment' is the Em.Lasker vs. Marshall game from the last round. I couldn't find any other chess history links on the chessbaseusa.com home page. --- Brief History of Chess by Edinburgh University Chess Club http://www.ed.ac.uk/~chess/Chess/History/ This is a small site of 4 paragraphs on the main page plus 5 additional links:- - Chess in Arabian Countries - Lewis Chess Pieces in Edinburgh. - Edward I and Chess - Medieval Chess Rules - Mir Sultan Khan It credits 'The Game of Chess' by H.Golombek. --- Rare Chess History Books by ChessMate.com http://www.chessmate.com/rarehist.html The page lists five books. More interesting is the 'Rare Books Index' at rarebks.html. Network Solutions lists David Weinstock as the administrative contact for chessmate.com. --- Morals of Chess by Benjamin Franklin http://truth.wofford.edu/~kaycd/CHESS-GO/bf-moral.htm This is a two page site maintained by Prof. Charles D. Kay of Wofford College. The comments page, which has additional links for Franklin, says 'This page is still under construction', but the page is dated 30 March 1996 & was last modified 8 August 1999. --- Today in Chess History by Peter Kadyszewski http://www.users.interport.net/~ramses/calendar.html This is a calendar of chess history. The last time I looked at this page, I thought it covered 1 January to mid-April or thereabouts. Now it covers 17 March ('Born: Oscar Roberto Panno, 1935 [...] Died: Semyon Abramowich Furman, 1978') - 6 May ('Died: Martin Severin Janus From, 1828 - 1895'). The page mentions the Stuy Town Chess Club. I discovered elsewhere that 'Stuyvesant Town [is] a private residential community on Manhattan's East Side'. The page is peppered with links to other sites, most of which are broken. In my opinion, the page, which is full of useful facts, would be even more valuable if the entire year were available at all times. I doubt that many people check 'today in chess history' on a regular basis. --- Jim Weinheimer Home Page http://www.princeton.edu/~jamesw/chess.html This site 'serving up reprints from the Princeton Chess Collection' has three main sections. [Games] covers nine historic games with biographies of the players. [E.B. Cook] is a biography of the famous problemist -- 'His efficiency in finding errors in problems entered into chess language: to "cook" a problem.' [Opinion] bemoans 'a conspicuous lack of modern annotated tournament books'. --- Why aren't these sites listed with the Chess History bookmarks? I have no good answer to this question & I'll probably link some of them some day. In the meantime they are linked indirectly via the bookmark for About.com. Building lists of bookmarks is a personal choice & there is no reason why different lists have to be identical. It is this diversity of opinion which makes the Web such a valuable source of data, information, knowledge, and wisdom. Bye for now, Mark Weeks