I have been programming very hard to build the next feature - to allow preview of board position in search result pages - so that users don't have to click into a game and find out that is not very interesting. The preview is done by generating the board positions at opening stage (say after 30th move) on thumbnail images.
Initially I thought that adding this function won't be difficult at all - I after all have experience building a fully fledged SGF viewer. But it turns out to be rather tricky, because I need to include a simple SGF parser and an algorithm to check dead stones. I also need to implement these in a scripting language with little built-in support on data structures
Any way, the work is more than half way done. Attached is a preview of what the thumbnail image looks like. BTW, this is a very popular game. Can you recognise it? I chose this game because it contains a lot of stone captures so that I can test my algorithm fully.
The new website is really good! It is very exciting to see new features coming one after another. This one you're talking about, the one that allows to keep track on games, and the come back of the games between 2 players. It must have been very hard so thanks a lot for the hard work Mace. Also, the series on the carpenter's square is welcomed!
Thanks for your feedback. Coding these new functions are not hard but can be time-consuming. Good news is that I do have some spare time now and I still quite enjoy doing these.
I will start rolling out the board thumbnail preview function quite soon. I can tell you the visual effect is quite amazing when I first saw it working on my test system.
Wow, it looks very good as it is, thanks again for the good work Mace!