Introduction

The SquirrelChess.com website describes the author's journey into the complex world of chess. It started as a way to keep notes on ways to improve chess play and to discuss chess games and chess improvement with other enthusiasts. Almost all of the material published on this site was originally intended to serve as personal notes to facilitate studying chess. However, I hope that publishing these notes will help some people to navigate their way through the maze of learning chess.

I am actively playing correspondence chess at ChessWorld and "live" at the Internet Chess Club (ICC), both using the handle Sciurus. Feel free to challenge me at ChessWorld for a game or two or register for free to play correspondence chess here at SquirrelChess!

Brief history of the site

Some of the content, in particular the Getting Into Chess weblog, was originally hosted at blogger.com. Getting Into Chess was started in February 2006 shortly after my attempts to learn chess got serious. Initially, I never planned to make SquirrelChess.com public because it was only intended to be an experiment to learn how to use modern content management systems (CMS). After a few months on and off playing with Joomla!, however, I realized that using Joomla! provides many powerful features that are not available for specialized blogging systems. Most importantly for a chess blog, most blogging platforms cannot host pages with interactive chess games. Therefore, I decided to take the plunge and move to a "do-it-yourself" site.

Site features

One of the great advantages of Joomla! is that it allows to build complex websites without having to learn about PHP scripting or SQL databases. Best of all, Joomla! based sites allow website visitors to contribute to the site. After registering, everybody can submit new links or even articles. Feel free to try it - registration is free! Many features, however, require approval by the site admin for publication to avoid spamming. Registered users can also play correspondence chess games on SquirrelChess.com Just sign up and challenge me (Sciurus) for a game!

Licensing