29 June 2009

Every Move Explained

One of the most popular features I created on About.com was the series I called 'Every Move Explained'. Along with the promised explanation per move, each game in the series had a diagram for every move, allowing the entire game to be followed without the use of an external board. To make the feature I used About's image gallery tool, and the result is shown below.


If you look closely you can see that the first thumbnail shows the start position, the second shows the position after 1.e4, the third shows 1...e5, and so on. Clicking on a thumbnail opened a page explaining that particular move, together with a larger diagram showing the position after the move. The pages for each move were linked together and scrollable both forward and backward.

After I uploaded the images for the game, About's software automatically created the thumbnails, which were of a higher quality than I get with the image gallery tool I'm using now. See La Bourdonnais' Curious Positions for an example.

My first attempt at recreating one of these features is Every Move Explained : 1844 Romantic Game. Instead of thumbnails and scrollable pages per move, it is a single, long page (a very long page!) with diagrams and explanations for all moves. I might try to redo it with the same software used for 'Curious Positions', but I'm almost certain I'll be disappointed with the results.

For the full series of features on Archive.org (the first nine of the 12 I created), see Index of Every Move Explained. This includes the original of 1844 Romantic Game.

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