chess blogging

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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