My name is Brian Stephenson and I am a retired IT professional. I read a lot and listen to the radio nearly all the time, being a big fan of audio drama. I play chess (badly) in my local league when my club is desperate to field a full team and I have set up a Sheffield Chess History Website.

I run chess problem solving competitions - the Winton Capital British Chess Solving Championship (WCBCSC) and the Sheffield end of the annual International Solving Contest (ISC), both on behalf of the British Chess Problem Society (BCPS). I write a monthly column about endgame studies in the British periodical CHESS, and those columns are slowly being republished here.

I have a large database of chess problems - Meson - that is accessible from this website and that is updated on as regular a basis as I can manage. In my really spare moments I have been known to compose and publish chess problems, most of which are very unorthodox, and which I am slowly posting on this website.

This website is about chess composition, chess solving and audio drama, though the latter is a rather poor relation at the moment. The website has been developed using Joomla, a popular Content Management System (CMS) and is best viewed with JavaScript switched on in your browser. On this site, the Main Menu (on the left) is nearly always there - the exception being some of the pages in Meson, though I hope that will be put right eventually when I bring that database fully within the normal Joomla framework. The items on that menu are Home, which always takes you back to the home page (or frontpage); About, which brings you to this article; Contact, which takes you to a form through which you can email me; Links, which takes you to a section containing links to sites I consider to be of interest (not exhaustive!); and Sitemap, which takes you to an hierarchical list of all the site’s menus and sub-menus (see below) and the articles accessible via them.

The site is navigable by clicking on the items in the grey Top Menu, between the green header and the white body of the page. The items in this menu are Audio Drama, Meson, Chess Composition, WCBCSC, Other Chess Solving and Blogs - all described in paragraphs below. After you click on one of these menu items, a new menu, containing items specific to that subject area, appears in the left column.

As new articles are added to the site, some of them also appear on the front page, mostly in the form of just a first paragraph with a link to the complete article, and there they stay until they are pushed off by newer material. Despite what happens on the front page, most posted articles remain on the site permanently in their complete form, accessible via the appropriate menus.

At present the Audio Drama section doesn’t contain much - just a few articles about the BBC radio drama output and irregular previews of upcoming broadcasts. Notice of these previews is normally posted on the front page.

The Meson section is where you can access the Meson Chess Problem Database. Go there to find out more about it. Notice of regular updates to Meson are not posted on the front page, though significant news about it will be mentioned in the appropriate blog (see later), which will make the front page.

The Chess Composition section contains links to introductory material about the subject, links to relevant magazines and websites and announcements and awards of composing tourneys. My columns in the periodical CHESS, going back to late 2006, are slowly being republished here, with new posts being mentioned on the front page. Getting these as up-to-date as possible is one of my continuing ‘back-burner’ tasks. There is an area for unsound studies (empty as of date of writing this), where I hope to post notice of such, a downloads area and a glossary. Lastly there in an area where I show selected chess compositions of all types and one where I am slowly posting my own chess compositions. New postings in the former category will normally be mentioned on the front page, though those in the latter  probably won’t be.

The WCBCSC section contains information about that competition, both about the currently running event and previous ones. The historical archive is as yet incomplete and getting this up-to-date is another of my ’back-burner’ tasks. Notice of significant events during a competition is normally posted on the front page.

The Other Chess Solving section is pretty rudimentary, being mostly limited at this stage to just short descriptions of solving events other than the WCBCSC. However, announcements about the British end of the ISC can be found here and do make the front page. A recent, and currently empty, part of this section is for my thoughts, as a director of solving events, about how they are run. This is another ‘back-burner’ section, but additions will probably be noted on the front page./div>

The Blogs section is divided into four areas - Audio Drama, Chess Composition, Meson and Must Grumble. The first three are self-explanatory and the fourth is intended to cover everything else, though I hope that not all the posts will be grumbles. As things have turned out I don’t get much time for these blogs. Such contributions as there may be will be noted on the front page.

If you find the size of the text on this site difficult to read, you can change it by clicking on the A+, A and A- links in the top right of the header. A+ and A- do what you would expect and A resets to the default font size. Also in the  header on the top right is a search box. Use this to search for anything on the site, outside of the Meson database.