Excuse, Bleg, Snul, and Preview of "Things to Come"

I have not been doing the work necessary to put the information on this blog that I had wanted too.

My wife is feeling the burden of being the sole provider, and we are both feeling uncertain of the value of our retirement savings considering the 1T dollars a year the Fed is printing. I am now under a dead line to make some real money from chess, or get a real job. As only a few of the very best can make a living playing chess and the opportunities for a class A player to get paid for coaching are limited, I am looking in a different direction.

You might have noticed the adding of a tip jar on the right side bar. I do not expect much from this, as I know I am not providing a lot of value on this blog. It is still mainly an improvement journal for my own benefit.

I have been very busy this year writing study tools for chess. The first fruit of this labor is the ebook monthly periodical "Following Kaufman" (which I intend to start charging 99 cents with the January issue with a free sample). I will add a second periodical "Wielding Wojo's Weapons" in November. I hope to make this technology available on a web site, so that you can create an ebook periodical from your own repertoire, but the program is still far from ready for that. Trying to make my chess book vision work in various ebook formats has been daunting. Epub is the most openly documented, and I have succeeded in creating epubs. Amazon has been very frustrating to deal with, but I may be able to make kindle formats on my own and put them up via Smashwords when they provide support.

I am also working on a web page to create chess flash cards. The free version will allow you to create a flash card and print it out in various sizes. I have a prototype version working. I intend to put it on the Rochester Chess Club site first, but I need HTML5 and that site is XHTML.

On my website, I intend to have some function available for free, a registration wall with more free function including a discussion forum, and a paying membership wall for the full set of tools.

I have more ideas for tools to help endgame training, documenting opening repertoires, using flash cards, and writing chess books. It is my hope that a full suite of study tools on a web site and appropriate supporting mobile apps can make a talent for programming and an avocation for chess pay.

Meanwhile, I intend to continue to study chess and how to improve at chess and document my ideas and success on this blog.