Chess Events for East Africa
Paras Gudka has announced the launching of a website that covers east African chess activities. “Chess Events EAC” will announce scheduled events in Kenya, Uganda, Tanzania, Rwanda and Burundi, but also has a function for events outside the East African Community (EAC). The site will also have historic reports, games, photos and a collective reservoir of chess news and links.
Nairobi Chess Club takes on Kenya Commercial Bank in Kenyan Chess League. Photo by Kim Bhari.
Interesting! This is good news. I hope this site will be as informative as The Chess Drum. Going for a visit now!
Hey Daaim, I think the brothers on East Africa website need your help. I hope they are reading your blog; because they should not upload a newspaper article with games. How will we review the games? Please go to a free server, where you can get a chess board, and input the games so we may replay them on your site. Looking forward to visiting your site often.
Having the readers play over games was not the primary reason for putting the newsletters on the blog. I think Paras was merely making the newspaper articles from 1997 available since many had not seen them.
Combining old newsletters with the new media is not always so easy in web design. I don’t know of any software to convert image files into those that can be edited so you can add links to the games. Maybe Adobe Acrobat can do this. They would have to take hours to input the games, generate them into a playable format and then make the links coincide with the newsletter. This is not easy to do.
These were good newsletters and to see them in 2010 is invaluable… nice picture with Anand there. 🙂 These are invaluable documents to make available to the public. I recognize a lot of the names of the legendary figures of East Africa. It’s also interesting reading the old news and rating lists. In time, they will improve, it but it takes time. If you saw the first issues of The Chess Drum, you would be appalled!
LOL. Although, why not copy and paste the games in notepad and save the file as a .pgn? I think this would work and it doesn’t take long.
How would you copy the games with cut and paste when it is a graphic image? Remember… you cannot copy text from an image file. Do you mean scan the magazine into a text file, go through each game, clean up the transmission errors, then copy and paste? What about the annotation symbols? Those certainly will not go over smoothly. Very tedious and time consuming for so many files.
In addition, the files you see are not PGN format, so you have to add the tags so they have the seven attributes, otherwise the cannot be imported. You’re looking at at least 40 minutes of work per game… and that’s if you’re good with computers and the applications. Inputting the games one by one into a database is probably the quickest way to do it. This is very tedious and time-consuming, but it’s probably best.
I converted a set of paper newsletters Maurice Ashley did for his 1992 African-American Unity tournaments and it took me a few days to do everything. That was many hours each day just to come up with this. However, it does not look like the original document. Converting games and content from old, paper magazines and newsletters are not as easy as you think. Try converting a game from an old magazine (with annotations), you’ll see.
Daaim:
Thank you so much for posting this to The Chess Drum blog. I hope more people from East Africa come forward with information on chess events happening in their respective regions. At the moment, finding reliable information is taking a lot of time and effort.
As for why I uploaded scanned copies of the newsletters, you hit the nail on the head. I was making available chess relics from the not-too-distant past for those who didn’t get to see them when they were published.
Paras,
Finding reliable information is indeed difficult. In the chess world, most are consumers and not producers. Few people understand how difficult it is to keep a website up and going strong. There are only a few long-running chess news websites. The Chess Drum is ten years old now and it has been very difficult because the contributions are few. My content centers around a niche, but if players of African descent are not very active, it becomes difficult to write quality stories.
Daaim:
Congratulations on having kept The Chess Drum alive for 10 years. I had no idea! You have done an excellent job of providing quality news to the chess community worldwide.
I hope to be able to do the same with Chess Events EAC in spite of all the hurdles I am facing with availability/reliability of information and personal attacks from disillusioned members of the Kenyan chess fraternity. I look forward to the day I find a link to Chess Events EAC on The Chess Drum’s blogroll. May 2011 be the year that happens!
Happy New Year to you and to the blog visitors reading this! May you checkmate 2011.
Daaim
Many thanks for putting the http://www.chesseventseac.com on your site. Kenyan chess benefits from your world wide audience.
I was involved in the preparation of the newsletter and will try to find the real document. I have a number of the games in pgn as well I just need time to dig it up.
I have a huge number of files with lots of historic information. I am hoping to sort it out and start to put them on the web.
Kim Bhari found historic treasures in his Kenyan chess archive. The 1998 African Junior Championship was hosted in Nairobi, Kenya. The article ran in the December 12th East African Standard. Nicholas van der Nat of South Africa is playing Robert Gwaze of Zimbabwe.
https://www.thechessdrum.net/blog/2010/12/30/kenya-archives-karanja/