Bringing Catur back to life again

By GilaChess - June 09, 2026

Before catur there was GilaChess

I lost GilaChess.com in the late 2000s because I procrastinated in renewing the domain and totally lost the name, coupled with my disappointment with Exabyte my webhost that allowed malware to attack their computers. It was a nightmare experience.

I have not recovered gilachess.com until today but I have registered .org and .net multiple times (again forgot to renew a few times) - but these websites never regained the type of traffic and readership of the original .com.

Anyway, I had moderate success with catur.org, my new website. It acted as an aggregator for local blogs, bringing in over 30 blogs' content into one space. But that too didn't last because blogging lost it's steam and almost all the local blogs stopped posting.

I never gave up. I kept my blog, and it has lasted 21 years. I don't blog for eyeballs or followers. It's more like a diary of events I want to save and remember.

Catur lost traffic and became dormant for more than a year. Last month, I did the unthinkable - I deleted the root directory of the website, effectively losing years of content.

Anyway, last month I started rebuilding the site, and with the help of AI, it has been "too easy". So easy that a lot of things that I wanted to do but could only dream of because of lack of funds and ability - now was possible because of AIs like Gemini, Claude, and DeekSeek (I don't like ChatGPT).

The result is this:

Rebranded it as "Malaysia's Chess Portal".

Catur comprise:

CaturNews
The core function of the old Catur website to aggregate and pull in contents from other blogs. Since local blogs are almost non-existant, I pull the news headlines from international websites like FIDE, Chessbase, LiChess, Chessdotcom etc.
CaturEvents
Malaysian chess tournament calendar and event dates.
CaturSkor
An interactive version of data pulled from chess-result showing extra details like opponents played, colours and results in ONE screen. This was a web app I wrote pre-Covid and now further developed with AI.
CaturFestival
A subsite for the Malaysian Chess Festival.
CaturGym
Structured lessons, daily puzzles, and an official learning syllabus.
CaturELO
Tool to incremental search a name in the FIDE database and return the ELO rating.
CaturReplay
Tool to replay your chess game on a 2D board. Just cut n paste your PGN.

From the early traffic stats, it is promising and that encourages me to work at completing more Catur.

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Opinion

PIP

By GilaChess - June 08, 2026

Chess event coverage concept by GilaChess

♟️ P · I · P philosophy

structured chess event coverage · GilaChess framework

📌 PIP is his philosophy for structured chess event coverage, standing for three essential stages: Opening (Pre-Event), Middlegame (In-Event), and Endgame (Post-Event).

🧠 What PIP stands for

“P‑I‑P” as the stages needed for a well‑covered chess event:

🎯 Opening Pre‑Event

Advance hype, announcements, registration info, previews — set the stage before the first move.

⚡ Middlegame In‑Event

On‑site updates, results, photos, pairings, stories as the tournament happens.

🏆 Endgame Post‑Event

Final results, prize‑winners, summaries, follow‑up content.

💡 It's like a game: if you only do one phase (for example, live updates with no build‑up or follow‑up), the “coverage game” is incomplete.

🛠️ How I apply it

📘 I have to admit I am not a good blogger, more of a hobbyist who likes to take pictures and writing is not really my strength in the least. Only in the 20th Malaysian Chess Festival did I come close to this complete coverage methodology. Not saying I did a perfect job but it was the most complete for each of the 3 stages. Compared to previous years, the work done was embarrassingly poor or non-existent for one or more stages.

🤖 To be truthful, the festival workflows did involve AI‑assisted content generation, I just couldn't write all of the reports in time - though I kept those to a minimum.