PlayXiangqi is two month old...

Since PlayXiangqi.com, our free online service to play XiangQi (Chinese Chess, 象棋) , first debut in June, it has been a learning experience. First, the site has been hacked a number of times. We had no idea that just having two simple PHP-based forms (for Register and Contact) introduced so many security holes on server. We, obviously, could have seen that coming due to our lack of PHP skills.

The second thing we learned is that a number of people who visit our site have Western Chess background. Knowing that Pieces with Chinese characters present a challenge to XiangQi newcomers, we added the support for Western Pieces in our Flash based web client.

The third thing that came to our attention is that HostMonster.com, where we host the web site, is not reliable enough. This is somewhat a surprise. We have seen it went down twice, each lasted about five minutes. Who'd know how many times it has been down without us knowing about it! It is a disappointment that HostMonster did not inform us in any way about the site outages. We thought that we have done enough enough research before choosing where to host our site. Clearly, we did not do enough.

After all things were said and done, we have learned a great deal. It takes a lot of hard work to bring up a good online service. We are still a long way from archiving our goals.