Shake up at SOTS!

Warning! Grab a hard hat, because I am doing some renovation! 

OK, thats an exaggeration no safety equipment is necessary. But I am making a few changes to how I post games, as well as to the style of the site.

To my regular readers, I thank you for your audience; I hope you enjoy the new site design. I have to apologize, however, for some redundancy that will result.

Not only are the colors different, but I am doing away with the java replay applet. It was cool and stylish (thanks pgn4web!) but ultimately I felt that the annotations were presented in a clumsy format. I decided, therefore, to go to an more throw-back style and present annotations in text with scattered diagrams. Now, if you'd like, you can print out these posts and read them on the train/bus/plane/etc.

To those itching to replay the games, I will still provide PGN files. If you don't know what PGN is, or how to read it, you can view my primer on PGN (portable game notation) from an earlier post. There are a bunch of free viewers on the web and for download. Here are a select few:

• Chess Tempo
• ChessFlash
• Pgn4Web

Due to this change in format, the opening articles I had posted previous would become unwieldy. Therefore, I decided to break these up into a number of smaller posts.

This, I think, affords several advantages. For starters, different lines can be linked together, and you can explore different variations without wearing out the scrollbar. Secondly, it will allow me to post the analysis of individual lines, instead of entire systems at once. I'll be able to make each post more detailed, and you won't have to wait so long for an update.

So, in what will seem like a flurry of posts, I will be reposting the analysis of the lines starting 1.e4 c5 2.Nf3 Nc6 3.Bb5 and 1.e4 c5 2.Bc4. There will be some updates, and the analysis will be more in depth in some lines. Soon to follow will be my long-promised work on 1.e4 c5 2.Nc3 e5

It's a shake up at SOTS! (Science on the Squares; I think the acronym has a nice ring to it). I welcome any an all reader suggestions on the site's format.