Game Viewer Frustration

     As you may know, as of December, 2020, Flash Player will no longer work. For years I was posting games using Glen Wilson’s excellent KnightVision program, but a while back ran into some problems with it because it uses Adobe Flash and will stop working when Flash stops working. Also, there were some other problems with KnightVision that cropped up so I switched to the very nice Caissa’s Web viewer, but disliked the fact that variations can only appear in the notes, so you can’t play through them in the viewer. 

     Chessbase also has a really nice game viewer, but it, too, had issues, the worst being that sometimes the text “bled” into the posts below the one in which the game appeared. 

     Eventually, I switched to ChessOK Aquarium 2014 for publishing. I really like the layout and appearance of the “Web Export for Blog” option, but ran into two huge problems. First, the code is 85 pages long in my Word document which is about 3,000 lines of code on Blogger! Second, all the squares with pieces on them show up as white. However, Aquarium’s publish “iBookHTML for Blog” option uses 16-18 Word pages and translates to 50-60 lines of code. 

     I really liked the layout of pgn4web and downloaded the program from SourceForge, but for some reason it would not work on my laptop. That was only a minor problem because for the last two posts I simply embedded the games directly off their website and everything seemed fine. Then, while checking my e-mail Sunday I had a message that the games didn’t show up...something about a DNS server couldn’t be found. Fortunately I had not deleted the annotated games from my “Junk Games” folder as I call it and was able to re-post them using Aquarium. 

     My workhorse remains the old Fritz 12 which I purchased years ago at Office Max for $20. However, using Aquarium to embed games in Blogger isn’t all bad because for the first time since purchasing it, I have found a use for it. Now if I could only find a use for Chess Assistant 18 that sits unused on both of my laptops. Any suggestions?!