Merry Christmas!

I wish a nice christmas to all players. All the best to you and your families!

Christmas presents

Yes, Christmas time is near again. (are you surprised?)

Are you going on a leave to your relatives? No opportunity to play chess, but little time on your clocks? Don't worry: I have reset your counter of taken holidays; thus you can stop your clocks until you come back (the full 7 / 14 / 21 days are available).
At the beginning of 2004, all holiday counters will be reset again. Taking some free days now will not diminish your number of holidays for 2004.

But if you have no time (or money) for a holiday trip, you can (at least) enjoy yourself here at PlayChess: for the next two weeks, all players can use the functions that are normally reserved for paying members (with one exception: your game limit will not change). So feel free to click on all these links that are marked with a blue triangle.

By the way: wouldn't a PlayChess membership be a nice Christmas present? Maybe you should put it on your wishlist - and hand this list over to your parents or husband/wife?

Tournament pages

Some minor corrections and improvements on the tournament pages:
- display of the computers allowed/forbidden icons
- correction of the tournament info of swiss tournaments
- changed the sort order of the tournament table for incomplete rounds
- latest results in swiss tournaments (PCO)

The newest 3 blog entries are shown on the player homepages. This replaces the older anouncements section there. These new technique has several advantages:
- entries older than 7 days are automatically removed
- only the first few words of the message are displayed. This avoids cluttering your player homepage
- these blog messages are automatically archived for later investigations

Web logs, blogs, diary - what?

You probably noticed it already: PlayChess is getting bigger. I integrated a specialized content management system (CMS) into the site. This "web log" (short: blog) system enables anybody to write content for PlayChess.

Why? The idea is to provide a platform for the PlayChess community, where you can write about chess-related topics of any kind. You can analyze the latest Kasparov game, report about your experience with a certain opening, discuss the critical position in your last OTB game.
And of course you can talk about your PlayChess experiences, too.

Who? In principle: any PlayChess member. You don't need to be a programmer, no need to know HTML. The only requirement is that you have something to say which is of (more or less) general interest.
On the other hand, this is not another kind of forum. Here is the place for amateur chess journalists who would like to write some articles and see theír name published in the internet. Even if the articles need not be long (10 lines can be enough), you should be prepared to put some effort into your writings. "Quick and dirty" posts are better at home in the forum.

How? Just send an email to me. If we don't know each other yet, please tell me a little about yourself and the topics you want to publish. I will then send you detailed information and a password.

Web logs at PlayChess
We will have several blogs (web logs) here. Each serves a different purpose and has its own group of authors.

Diary. This is my personal playing ground. I will use it to announce new developments.

Chess world. Reports about the world of chess. These articles may or may not relate to PlayChess. Here you can analyze games, report your latest experiences or present some interesting links to chess sites. It's all up to you - please, surprise me with your ideas!

More... I have some more ideas what we can do with this blog system. But let us start slowly and get some experience...