Wednesday, October 11, 2006

To Be Or Not To Be

No, I am not Shakespeare nor am I contemplating suicide. My domain name registration and hosting for my chess site located at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com are coming up for renewal in December. I need to decide between now and then if I want to renew the web site and keep it on the Internet or just let it die. To be honest, I have gotten discouraged lately and am leaning toward removing all of my sites from the Internet. None of my sites have earned any real money and I have gotten tired of losing money on web site hosting and domain name registration! On the chess site I have links for books that people can buy from Amazon.com and Google AdSense ads. So far, I have earned a whopping $13 from Amazon and it has taken me almost two years to earn less than $50 from AdSense! At 4 to 7 cents per click it will take me forever to get to the $100 minimum to get a check from Google!

To add to my discouragement I put a button on my home page asking people to donate to my site to help me cover the costs of keeping the site up. So far, I have yet to receive even ten cents from anyone! To make matters worse, I put a poll on my site asking people to tell me what incentive they want to donate. I have yet to get one person to answer my poll question! I am going to change the poll to ask if I should keep the site up or take it down. If no one answers that poll question then I may very well take that site down. If I do leave it up, it will be because I want to use it as an example of my work while seeking a job as a webmaster. If you want to help me out by answering my new poll question you can go to http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com/Poll.php and answer my question. I would appreciate the input.

Friday, October 06, 2006

Mike Serovey Draws rayz With the Sicilian Defense

Posted below is the PGN format of my draw against rayz, a player at ICC. The complete game, with analysis and diagrams can be found at http://www.mikeseroveyonchess.com/Rayz-Sicilian.html. I plan to post more of my correspondence games on the site and this blog over the next couple of weeks.

[Event "ICC correspondence 2006Quad.30.09"]
[Site "Internet Chess Club"]
[Date "2006.08.05"]
[Round "-"]
[White "rayz"]
[Black "OnGoldenPawn"]
[Result "1/2-1/2"]
[ICCResult "Game drawn by mutual agreement"]
[Opening "Sicilian defense"]
[ECO "B44"]
[NIC "SI.39"]
[Time "21:08:44"]

1. e4 c5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. d4 cxd4 4. Nxd4 e6 5. Bc4 Nf6 6. f3 Bb4+ 7. Bd2 Qa5 8. Nb3 Bxd2+ 9. N1xd2 Qb4 10. Qe2 O-O 11. O-O-O d5 12. exd5 exd5 13. Bd3 Be6 14. g4 Nxg4 15. Rdg1 Nge5 16. Bb5 Rfc8 17. a3 Qd6 18. Bxc6 Nxc6 19. h4 Qe5 20. Qf2 b5 21. Rg5 Qf6 22. Rhg1 g6 23. h5 b4 24. hxg6 hxg6 25. a4 Bf5 26. Qh4 d4 27. Rxg6+ Qxg6 28. Rxg6+ fxg6 29. Nxd4 Nxd4 30. Qxd4 Rxc2+ 31. Kd1 Rcc8 32. Qxb4 a5 33. Qb3+ Kh7 34. Qf7+ Kh6 35. Ne4 Bxe4 36. fxe4 Re8 37. Qf4+ g5 38. Qh2+ Kg6 {Game drawn by mutual agreement} 1/2-1/2