new puzzle! 'the ick factor'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords - the theme is 'the ick factor.' Have fun with it!

Ben Tausig on the "Broken Crossword Puzzle Economy"

People who have done crossword puzzle construction in the hopes of making even a little money off of it might find Ben Tausig's recent article, "Solving The Broken Crossword Puzzle Economy," to be of interest.

It's true that puzzle constructors just aren't paid very well, and crossword puzzles appear to be something of a cash cow for The New York Times and similar media outlets. The New York Times has brand recognition, like a Starbucks or McDonald's - you know what to expect when you go there. And crossword solvers have the time to solve, perhaps, at most one puzzle per day. I don't think it's unreasonable that they'd prefer to devote this time to solving a puzzle that's a "known quantity."

Some constructors - Brendan Emmett Quigley comes to mind - have done a great job at developing a reputation, and apparently no longer need to work under an aegis to attract an audience. But less well-known constructors still need an imprimatur to gain the trust of solvers. For them, an increase in the base rate and the addition of royalty payments, as urged by Tausig, would make a huge difference. Let's hope this becomes the norm.

new puzzle! - 'themeless 11'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. It's another themeless puzzle this week, our eleventh. We hope you enjoy the additional challenge!

Both my sister and I have been exceptionally busy of late. We've turned over a couple of theme ideas, but haven't yet found one that's up to our standards. We hope to publish a new themed puzzle soon, though. Meantime, we hope the themeless puzzles will be a treat for those who enjoy that type.

new puzzle! 'themeless 10'

The new World of Crosswords puzzle is now available. It's another themeless, our tenth. Have fun with it!

new puzzle! 'superlative!'

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is 'superlative!' - enjoy!

new puzzle! 'place for my stuffing'

We've carried the theme from last week ('place for my stuff') a little further... this week's theme is 'place for my stuffing' to give it a seasonal twist. Happy Thanksgiving!

new puzzle! 'place for my stuff'

The crossword puzzle for the week of November 11th is themed 'place for my stuff' - fans of comedian George Carlin might recognize this reference. Please note that our crossword puzzle is free of obscenity! :)

new puzzle! 'themeless 9'

The latest World of Crosswords puzzle went up on Sunday! There's no theme this week. This is our ninth themeless puzzle. We hope you enjoy solving it!

A.V. Club has cancelled their crossword

I'm sad to hear the news (via Ben Tausig on twitter) that A.V. Club has cancelled their weekly crossword. If you want to protest, Ben reports that you should complain to jmodell@theonion.com. I've already written to them. Let's hope that they will reinstate the puzzle soon!

new puzzle! 'scary spots'

We've got a Halloween theme up at World of Crosswords this week. The theme is 'scary spots.' We hope you enjoy it, and have a Happy Halloween!

new puzzle! 'colorful characters'

Have fun working the new puzzle at World of Crosswords! The theme this week is 'colorful characters.'

new puzzle! 'toppers'

The latest crossword puzzle went up at World of Crosswords on Sunday. The theme is 'toppers.' Enjoy solving the puzzle! IMHO, at least one of the theme entries is tougher than usual...

new puzzle! 'ready for the recycling bin...'

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. This week, the theme is eco-friendly - 'ready for the recycling bin....' We hope you enjoy figuring it out!

new puzzle! 'themeless 8'

There's a new puzzle up at World of Crosswords. This week, it's another "themeless." We hope you enjoy the challenge!

Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest

Matt Gaffney's Weekly Crossword Contest has been moved to a new domain (previously it was just hosted on blogger).

new puzzle! 'hollywood glitz'

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme for this week is 'hollywood glitz.' There are only 3 theme entries, but two of them are 15 letters long, filling an entire row across the grid. We hope you enjoy solving it!

new puzzle! 'anger management'

The crossword for the week of September 16, 2012, had the theme 'anger management.' Check it out!

new puzzle! 'nautical nutz'

The latest crossword has been up on World of Crosswords since Sunday. The theme is 'nautical nutz' - hope you have fun with it!

new puzzle! 'violets in film'

There's a new puzzle at World of Crosswords! The theme is "violets in film." Enjoy!

new puzzle! 'food groups'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "food groups." Have fun with it!

new puzzle! 'themeless 7'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. It's "themeless" this week - a bit more of a challenge than usual!

new puzzle! 'animal crackers'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "animal crackers" - hope you enjoy the puns!

new puzzle! 'ski resort'

The latest crossword at World of Crosswords has been up since Sunday. The theme is 'ski resort.' We hope you will find the theme entries entertaining!

new puzzle! 'precarious positions'

The latest crossword went up at World of Crosswords yesterday. The theme is 'precarious positions.' I hope you have as much fun figuring out the theme entries as I did creating them!

new puzzle! oo!

The new crossword puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. Actually it went live on Sunday, I'm just a bit late in announcing it... The theme is "oo!" - we hope you have oodles of fun with it!

new puzzle! fun in the sun

The latest World of Crosswords puzzle is seasonally themed; it's called "fun in the sun." This is our second summer-themed puzzle. The first, published at the end of May, was "beach sounds."

We hope you're having a fun summer... Stay cool!

new puzzle! themeless 5

The latest crossword puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. It's our fifth themeless puzzle ("themeless 5"). We haven't had a themeless puzzle in while... hope you enjoy it!

new puzzle! wanted

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords! The theme is "wanted" - there's a pun to the theme name. Enjoy figuring it out!

new puzzle! vacancy

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords! The theme is "vacancy." We hope you enjoy solving the puzzle!

new puzzle! beach sounds

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords! The theme is "beach sounds" to kick off the summer. Have fun with it!

new puzzle! m&m's

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is m&m's. It was fun creating the theme entries; we hope you enjoy figuring them out.

new puzzle! celebrate mother's day

Happy Mother's Day! Our weekly crossword has the theme celebrate mother's day. We hope you enjoy the puzzle, and the day!

new puzzle! sightings

The latest crossword is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is sightings. This is one of my favorite puzzles; I really like the theme. I hope you enjoy it!

new puzzle! horsing around

There's a new crossword up at World of Crosswords. The theme is horsing around.

This latest puzzle was created early in the history of our site. At the time, I wasn't aware of certain rules governing standard crosswords. In particular, I'm talking about rule six, "Long theme entries must be symmetrically placed." There's a theme entry in today's crossword that has no matching symmetrically placed entry. The puzzle actually has five theme entries; I suppose you could consider the fifth asymmetrical entry a bonus theme entry! Personally, I don't feel strongly about this rule, so it doesn't bother me. I hope you'll enjoy the crossword, even in cases like this where we break these rules!

new puzzle! can't see the forest for the trees (arbor day anagrams)

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "can't see the forest for the trees (arbor day anagrams)" (permalink). The theme entries are a little trickier than usual; I hope you enjoy figuring them out.

This year, Arbor Day is April 27, this coming Friday. After you work the crossword puzzle, you may want to celebrate Arbor Day by going out and planting a tree!

new puzzle! budgetary constraints

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "budgetary constraints" (permalink). We hope you enjoy it!

new puzzle! easter literature

Happy Easter! The weekly crossword puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "easter literature".

Here's the permalink: World of Crosswords.

new puzzle! fourth themeless

The weekly crossword puzzle went up at World of Crosswords yesterday. It's another themeless. Here's the permalink:
http://worldofcrosswords.com/index.php?p=28.

new puzzle! extra innings

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "extra innings," to celebrate the start of the Major League Baseball season.

The puzzle is a little trickier than usual, because the theme entries are placed in non-standard locations - not symmetrically located across from each other.

This puzzle was created early in the history of the site, before I knew about the standard rules for creating crosswords. It's still pretty good, so I hope you will give it a try! Here's a permalink to extra innings.

new puzzle! odd menagerie

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "odd menagerie," hope you enjoy it!

new puzzle! seasonal menu

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "seasonal menu" (permalink).

new puzzle! third themeless

The crossword puzzle for this week is themeless. This is our third themeless puzzle. Here's the permalink:
http://worldofcrosswords.com/index.php?p=24

new puzzle! unlikely hairdos

Yesterday, the weekly puzzle went up at World of Crosswords. Its theme is "unlikely hairdos." Here's the permalink, http://worldofcrosswords.com/index.php?p=23.

how do you feel about clechos?

A "clecho" is a "clue echo" - where two or more crossword puzzle clues are similar or the same. For example, in the L.A. Times crossword of Feb 19, 2012, 45A and 105A are clechos; both clues are "Hm...". The corresponding answers are, of course, different. 61A ("Design deg.") and 62A ("Designer Saarinen") are also considered clechos, even though they are not quite the same.

So far as I can tell, the term clecho was first used to describe the repeated use of "Eagle" as the theme clue in the October 6, 2010 L.A. Times puzzle. The word "clecho" was reportedly coined by one "Dennis," who writes at the L.A.Times Crossword Corner blog.

I'm happy with clechos when they occur as theme clues. In that case, it's perfectly clear what's going on, and it highlights the theme. However, when they appear scattered about throughout the puzzle, I get a little annoyed. Is it supposed to be clever? Is it just lazy? If the two clues are not close together, I might actually miss the fact that they are clechos; then it's kind of pointless.

There's a little discussion going about clechos over at the cruciverb puzzle forum. If you've got an opinion, post there, or here in the comment section.

new puzzle! look sharp

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme is "look sharp". Here's the permalink, http://worldofcrosswords.com/index.php?p=22, for posterity.

if it's good enough for the NYTimes...

There's a fun article by Eric Konigsberg at the New Yorker regarding a recent "scandalous" theme entry in a NY Times crossword puzzle:
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/culture/2012/02/crossword-scandal-the-timess-mid-ass-touch.html (from Feb 10 2012).

Yes, you saw it right, they used "MIDASSTOUCH". Konigsberg reports that the entry SCUMBAG has been used during Will Shortz's reign, as well. I assure you that we will never use the latter word at World of Crosswords. I won't make any promises about ASS; that is a perfectly good word!

new puzzle! the weather report

The weekly puzzle is up at World of Crosswords:
http://worldofcrosswords.com/?p=21
The theme is "the weather report"; hope you like it!

new puzzle! themeless #2

Our second themeless puzzle is up at World of Crosswords:
http://worldofcrosswords.com/?p=20
Enjoy!

new crossword: musical funnies

This week, we've got a theme: "musical funnies". Give it a try: http://www.worldofcrosswords.com/index.php?p=19

themeless

The puzzle for this week is a themeless one. Check it out here: http://worldofcrosswords.com/?p=18

version 0.1.4

Version 0.1.4 of World of Crosswords is now up. This is a bug fix update.

The following issues were fixed:

1. Logged in users can now save any number of crossword puzzles that they're working on. If you're not logged in, as usual, you can only save up to four.
2. When using the arrow keys, navigation now mimics the behavior of WordWeb's Crossword Solver. So you can now switch between a highlighted row or column without clicking on the mouse. If a row is highlighted, and you hit the up or down key, then the selected square does not move; instead, the column becomes highlighted. If a column is highlighted, and you hit the left or right arrow key, then the row becomes highlighted.
3. Easter eggs were only showing up when the page was freshly loaded, not when using the "new puzzle" or "load saved puzzle" buttons. This has been fixed so that easter eggs now appear when those buttons are used.
4. Easter eggs have been moved so they appear near the mouse click which produced them, making them a little easier to find.

ISO-8859-1 vs UTF-8

This is a developer note. Just ignore it if you only visit here for crossword-y stuff.

Our earliest crosswords had typical letters in the clues, no peculiarities like diacritics. For example, in the "trick or treat" puzzle, 1D is clued with "Snag". A perfectly ordinary English word, no special characters.

In next week's puzzle, themed "chocolate", 43D is clued "Dalí contemporary". With that accent on the "i", we found a bug in the site.

The clue looks fine when querying the database, but that doesn't really tell you anything. For all you know, your database client is encoding the characters differently from your web server.

And indeed, in previewing this puzzle, I could see that the clue looked incorrect on the website. The "í" looked like "í".

I'm familiar with this problem from previous work with PHP based web sites, so I knew what to look for. I was pretty sure the database encoding was fine, and the problem was in the way the web page was being displayed. Eventually I got to this page which explained the solution really well.

I looked at the header info in Firebug, and found it was ISO-8859-1 (aka Latin-1). I thought that should be OK, because "í" is part of the ISO-8859-1 character set. However, somewhere along the way, that ISO-8859-1 character is apparently being converted to UTF-8, while the web page displays it as ISO-8859-1. At least I think this is what's happening.

I also found a page at Blue Box which indicates you've got problems if your database is using latin1 encoding. I am in that situation and really don't have control over it (not my db server). Here's the related query:

mysql> show variables like 'char%';
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------------+
| character_set_client | latin1 |
| character_set_connection | latin1 |
| character_set_database | utf8 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | latin1 |
| character_set_server | latin1 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
| character_sets_dir | /data/mysql/brackemyre/share/mysql/charsets/ |
+--------------------------+----------------------------------------------+
8 rows in set (0.01 sec)

OK that's not nice, but not much I can do about it.

In the end, I added this code to the top of my PHP file:
header('Content-Type: text/html; charset=utf-8');

I also added a meta tag to my HTML: 
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8">

This fixed the problem, as you can see from the screenshot below:

The fix was remarkably easy, whew. Internationalization can sometimes be a real pain.

Crossword puzzle resources

I've started collecting links which are crossword related. I'll use this post to keep the list.

1. Crosswords Online: Cruciverbalizing on the Web by Kirk McElhearn This article is from 2003, so it's a little out of date. It's mainly focused on the NY Times puzzle, and it has a nice summary of crossword puzzle applications (primarily focused on Macs).
2. Ray Hamel's crossword page has a thorough list of links to crossword resources on the web.

new puzzle up - cats

Our newest puzzle, entitled cats, is up as of yesterday. Enjoy!

Happy New Year!

The puzzle for this week is themed "Happy New Year!". I think it's one of our best so far. Hope you enjoy it!