I remember writing my first open source “Shoutbox” for PostNuke 7 years ago. It brought me instant fame on the online world and it was a good feeling. I got huge hits on my personal site with people downloading my free script. Back then I never thought about things like “monetizing” the website to capitalise on the traffic.

Now I’m doing the same thing by giving out a free publishing tool for chess bloggers who want to include a chess diagram easily into their blog. I even registered the domain ChessPublisher.com for this purpose. This time I did include a couple of Google Adsense block into it but I don’t hope to earn a lot from it. I’ll probably get a lot of backlinks for this free tool. That itself is a good thing, and I can decide later how to monetize that site.

What I’m happy is that this is my first personal programming project I have completed since I quit my job. It’s a simple tool that runs on top of WordPress and the membership system seamlessly integrates well with WordPress login/authentication. Of course, the first thing I did was to show off to my other programmer friends to get a “”wow” out of them. The second thing I did was to invite Women World Chess Champion, Susan Polgar, to review the tool, since she is a heavy user of my previous “chess publisher”. She just announced my Chess Publisher tool on her blog. There’s no better publicity than that in the chess online community.

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