Winged Spider was developed to maintain the New Zealand Chess Federation website, and it makes sense for it to have a special chess feature built in. Basically I have copied and pasted it from the nascent 'Publish' feature included in my Tarrasch Chess GUI. I made interactive Magazine, Listener and Bulletin pages on the NZCF site with Tarrasch for several years, but it involved repetitious labour in a GUI and it was a great relief to automate it with Winged Spider.
Basically all you need to do if you want to use this feature is put .pgn files alongside markdown files. It's also possible to use a text editor to add markdown format text like this between the games. Make sure you leave a blank line between the text and the chess content and very importantly, see also the note at the bottom of the page.
The rendered pages themselves I quite like, preferring the 'chess book' style presentation to the more normal one big diagram presentation. It can be a little slow if you don't have a fast connection to the server, hopefully I'll have a chance to improve it at some time (the underlying technology is unchanged for years).
One important technical point, on the NZCF website I use publishv1.04.js which is exactly the same as publishv1.03.js used in this example except that 1.04 assumes there are two images in the header and 1.03 assumes there are none. Relying on exactly zero, or two or any other number of extra images is a truly sad limitation I hope to eliminate at some stage, hopefully sooner rather than later. The only place you can safely add images to chess pages like this is after all the chess.
In my chess writing I am normally (and justifiably) very self deprecating but for my example here I thought I would take the opportunity to show I can play a bit, this is perhaps my favourite game, from New Zealand's biggest weekender, in 2007.
Krstev, Mario - Forster, Bill
Waitakere Trust Open 2007
1.d4 Nf6 2.c4 e6 3.Nc3 Bb4 4.f3 d5 5.a3 Bxc3+ 6.bxc3 dxc4 7.e4 e5? 8.Bxc4 Be6 9.Bxe6 fxe6 10.Qb3 O-O 11.Qxe6+ Kh8 12.Qxe5 Objectively the opening has been a catastrophe and Black is quite lost, but he does have a lead in development... 12...Nc6 13.Qg3?
Moves are clickable
Just one mistake is sufficient for a turnaround. This is not the best square and Black has a lot of fun for the rest of the game. Both White's proud extra centre pawns look securely defended but Black gives up both knights for them to tear the position open. 13...Nxd4! 14.cxd4 Qxd4 15.Ra2 Qc4 Fork! 16.Ne2 Qxa2 17.Qxc7? Inviting catastrophe (17.Qe5 returns the Queen from exile and White can try to grovel an exchange down ) 17...Rac8 18.Qxb7
18...Nxe4! 19.fxe4 Rxc1+! 20.Nxc1 Qxg2! Leaving White completely helpless 21.Nd3 Qxh1+ 22.Kd2 Qxh2+ 23.Kc3 Qb8 24.Qe7 Re8 25.Qh4 Qc7+ 26.Kd2 Qa5+ 27.Ke2 Qxa3 28.e5 Qa6 29.Kd2 Qh6+! A nice practical decision. White does not want to be accused of premature resignation. For anxious players like me in such circumstances it's a good idea to permanently prevent any possible queen plus knight shenanigans. A knight hates rook pawns, and here it faces three of them! Even so as a nervous finisher I wanted to give up my rook for the knight and eliminate the possibility of forks as well, but White never gave me a chance. 30.Qxh6 gxh6 31.Ke3 Kg7 32.Ke4 Kg6 33.Nc5 h5 34.Kf4 h4 35.e6 Kf6 36.Kg4 Rxe6 37.Kxh4 Ke5 38.Kg4 Rg6+ 39.Kf3 Kd4 40.Nb3+ Kc3 41.Nc5 a5 42.Ke2 Kc4 43.Na4 Kb4 44.Nb2 Rg2+ 0-1
If you have text like this after the last game, unfortunately you also need to add
a dummy game to go with it. This is a quirk of the Tarrasch publishing code
which processes all text between games strictly as a prefix to a game. So I need a game
for which this text is prefix. It's not a serious problem just make a
Dummy game at the very end of the file which looks like
this.
#SkipGame
[White "Dummy"]
[Black "Dummy"]
[Result "*"]
*
With the dummy game in place, the prefix to the dummy game will be rendered as html, but the dummy game won't be.