Psychic Origami

Updates to chrss:

• now setting guid for moves in the rss feed (so the entries can be told apart, even though they point to the same url)
• when you sign up you should no longer get redirected back to the sign up page after you first log in
• if you create an account, when accepting an invite, you should get redirected back to the original join link when you log in (uses a cookie to record the “join url”)
• added info about whose move is next when browsing games

First few minor bug fixes for chrss. Fixes:

• Now using absolute URLs in the rss feed. The feed also now validates at http://validator.w3.org/feed/.
• Corrected redirection issues, due to not running chrss off the base of the site

Still to be fixed:

• After creating an account and logging in, you get redirected back to the signup page (which is confusing).
• When creating an account during accepting an invite you don’t get redirected back to the page to accept the invite.

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).