To resolve the disconnection problems I migrated mekk.waw.pl to another Linode datacenter, now it is operating from London. So far it seems that it helped, not a single disconnection during first day of work (while from Newark there were a few connection breaks an hour).

You could notice that, since December, WatchBot started to have connectivity problems. The most visible effect is that a lot of games are splitted into many separate parts in spite of the fact that no adjournment by players took place.

Two small updates to the WatchBot website:

• whispers made by the people playing the game are marked with different background color,
• new quick search option is present in the sidebar.

A few small, but possibly useful improvements of the WatchBot search. It is now possible to search games by the result, use any rating ranges, and limit search to games commented by at least a few players.

I updated WatchBot website a little bit, adding some new filtering/navigation options which make it possible to reach older games. Also, it is now possible to follow WatchBot on Twitter.

The Watchbot games feed changed it's address and is currently available as http://feeds.mekk.waw.pl/WatchbotInterestingGames. Old address should be properly redirected, but I recommend updating it. New feed should handle less popular or older readers better and be faster (technically: it is filtered through feedburner).

Per-player feeds remain unchanged and work as described previously.

The feed notifies about games which:

New WatchBot feature. It is now possible to publish WatchBot games on external websites. So, for example, you can show the game you played on your blog.

Here is the example (one of my TeamLeague) games:

Have you ever been curious how is WatchBot picking the games to observe and save? Here is the explanation.

New WatchBot  feature: Atom feeds are now available, so one can use RSS reader to be notified about new games.

The following feeds are available:

• interesting games,
• player-specific games.

WatchBot can help you improve your chess. It can be used to:

• conduct PV Exercise;
• save notes for the teacher (or for own analysis);
• learn from better players.