well, I've been swamped at home (and kept in a constant state of near dead sleepiness) but I just wanted to take a minute and explain some changes that have been made to the site.

First, our "Chessvine's Rankings" widget corner has been going through some major changes. I removed the mybloglog widget because it was causing the whole main page to have difficulty loading. Now, with smaller widgets and the blogged.com editor ranking widget the page loads fast even for a dialup connection!

Second, our traffic generation has begun a steady increase that makes me confident it'll keep growing but I'm still looking into the blog carnival idea as well as maybe link sharing and other common marketing techniques. The unexplored country for chess bloggers seems to be technorati (as blogs that have nothing to do with chess appear in the listing and are higher ranked than more valuable chess sites on technorati). Therefore, I'm going to look into any method of increasing external links back to chessvine (and therefore increase my technorati authority and ranking.

Thirdly, I'm going to be looking for strategic partnerships in the days ahead so look for announcements on this front coming soon. There's nothing finalized yet (other than chessvine's obvious affiliateship with brainking) but we're looking into it.

That's really all for now but if you noticed changes you might have been curious ... curiosity satisfied!?!

As of yesterday afternoon the Chessvine Blogger Contest was featured on Susan Polgar's Blog. A big thank you to Susan is due. As I've said before I'm a big fan of Susan's blog and it's a great model for what chess blogs should look like. Naturally, we recommend Susan's site to all chess fans and obviously Susan thinks that Chessvine, although new to the scene, has potential. We flatter ourselves with that same notion.

Here's the Link ... http://susanpolgar.blogspot.com/2008/07/chessvine-contest.html

For those who have an mp3 player/ipod or who are visually impaired Chessvine now offers podcasting services through odiogo.com. The Odiogo software aggregates the blog rss feed and using a voice synthesizer (the best I've ever heard) translates everything in Chessvine blog posts into spoken language. I not only think this will eventually be useful but it's also REALLY COOL!!

I'll be adding a button to the main page soon but until I do here's a link ...

Chessvine Odiogo Page

Promoting chess writing is one of the main goals of Chessvine. We bring up controversial issues here with an admitted cavalier attitude in the hopes that great writers will add their opinions to the mix.

With that all in mind we're starting our first contest here on Chessvine. From the posting of this article until September 1st we're running an essay contest for bloggers.

Guidelines:

• The topic of the essay must be in some way related to chess.


• One entry per person (if you're discovered, you're disqualified).


• You must be the proud owner of a chess blog (the entry can be the first blog entry ever but it must be a blog post).


• Entries received after September 1st, 2008 are ineligible.


• Other qualifications are at Chessvine discretion.

Entry:

To enter simply post the article's URL into the comment field for this blog entry ... it's that simple. Naturally, the article must contain a hyperlink to Chessvine. Otherwise I won't know which article you're submitting.

Prizes

• 1st - A guest blogger account will be created for you on Chessvine for six months. Blog anytime you want about chess and post it to Chessvine. Also, you'll be given advertising space on Chessvine for your blog for six months as an Affiliate of Chessvine.


• 2nd - A guest blogger account on Chessvine allowing you to voice your opinion for three months. Three months of exposure for your blog as an affiliate of chessvine.


• 3rd - A guest blogger account with us for one month.

In addition, any submitted content may be posted by Chessvine and attributed to you (referencing the blog URL). So even if you don't win you may still get exposure from the contest!

Since we're really a 'startup' at the moment we'll be doing alot of site verifications for indexes (which involves making odd posts or adding meta data to the main page). Since the Sernedipity platform software Chessvine uses isn't friendly to altering meta data This post in particular is serving as a verification for mybloglog.

Undergoing MyBlogLog Verification