Honeycomb Tours

I have added a new page about tours of Honeycomb Boards to the Knight's Tour Notes pages. This collage shows a selection of results. Some date back to 1974 when I sent an example tour to W. Glinski whose Hexagonal Chess on a 91-cell board was popular. Others are new results. I've included wazir, king and knight tours that show various different types of symmetry.

Archiving Websites

I've received requests from the British Library to allow my Knight's Tour Notes and Mayhematics websites to be "archived". I think this is a result of requests sent to them by John Beasley with regard to the archiving of the Chess Variants material and the BCVS site.

The address of the archive is: http://www.webarchive.org.uk/ukwa/. I've received emails acknowledging receipt of the online forms that I filled in, but I expect it will be some time before the sites actually appear in the archive. I took the precaution of removing some of the illustrations from the Biographies section of the Mayhematics site, in case they do not meet the copyright requirements.

Website Improvement and Expansion

This week I've been making some major additions and revisions to my mayhematics website. In the first place I have reverted to an older style for the home page, using the rainbow colours to classify the subjects into six sections, and doing away with the three intermediate index pages. I'd really like the six sections, and the centre one, to be circular but square is the best I can do at present.

The next big change is to the Variant Chess section, due to the closure of the BCVS. All 64 back issues of Variant Chess magazine are now available for download from the Variant Chess page. Most of the labour of scanning the magazines, apart from the first eight issues, was done by Peter Fayers to whom thanks are due. At the bottom there is also a link to the list of books and journals which I collected over the years and were part of the BCVS Library, but which I'm now calling the Variant Chess Library. It occupies a bookcase and some boxes in the entrance passage to my flat.

The other change is the addition of a series of pages of short biographies, mainly of radical reformers in the humanist movement, but also including notable scientists and others (there will be many more to add). Some of these were written for the Leicester Secular Society website, and others I had prepared as notes for a series of talks on the History of Humanism. Many have now appeared in shorter form on the Humanist Heritage site maintained by Hamish Macpherson for the BHA.

All in all a very productive week.

My Website Reorganised

This Sunday I've spent most of my time at the computer rearranging the material on my mayhematics.com website. Most of the content is unchanged, it is just the way the pages are classified that has changed. The Index page now leads to three sitemaps, one covering Chessics and the others Reality and Fantasy. It took much more work than I expected, and several FTP sessions, to get all the links, forward and backward, to work correctly.

I've more or less given up on CSS (Cascading Style Sheet) methods, finding them more trouble than they are worth, particularly if you want to change anything. I've reverted to simple HTML. All necessary styling, which I keep to the minimum, is all on the page itself.

There is one new item, namely a version of the missing Issue 45 of the Games and Puzzles Journal, which was lost but now is partially found. It comprises only three articles, the others needing further work.

The website got confused when NTL closed down my old Home pages and I was forced to squeeze them into the mayhematics site. The different sets of material are now much more spaciously arranged, which should allow for ease of development.