oops!

We apologize for the lack of a new puzzle this week...  If you're looking for a substitute, please visit the archives, or check out a new puzzle from inkwell or BEQ. We promise we'll be back with a fresh crossword next week!

new look - the clues get scrollbars!

Since we launched our crossword puzzle website in 2011, we've had requests from users to put the clues in a scrolling view, so that it's possible to view any clues next to the puzzle matrix. It made sense to us, so it has been implemented. Take a look! Here's the new view:

The scrolling view was implemented by yours-truly using the YUI3 ScrollView API. We hope this makes solving puzzles easier than before! Feel free to leave feedback either by email or as a comment here.

new puzzle - 'build a sandwich'

The latest puzzle is up at World of Crosswords. The theme this week is 'build a sandwich.' This is one of my favorite puzzles so far! One of the theme entries is particularly tricky, containing a reference to a local point of interest for us. I hope you enjoy learning about it.

Since this is the first puzzle in the month of February, it is also available in the Stand Alone Crosswords app!  If you've already bought the app, you will find the puzzle there as of yesterday. For more information, check out my previous blog post about this cool app. If you don't already own the app, you may want to purchase it. You can try the free Stand Alone Crosswords Lite app to get an idea of how it works, before buying.

Solve our crosswords on mobile devices!

This month, World of Crosswords became a puzzle provider for the Crosswords app produced by Stand Alone, Inc. You can use their app on devices like the iPod, iPad, and Android tablets to work our crosswords!

We'll be providing the first puzzle of each month via Crosswords, and I'll post a reminder when this happens. The puzzle will remain available on our site, as well, so you can solve it in your browser, if you prefer (or you can print it out as usual from our website).

Our first puzzle to show up in Crosswords is 'fiscal cliff notes.' You can take a look at the screenshots below to get an idea of how the puzzles look in the app. The screenshots are from my Asus EEE Transformer Prime tablet (Android), but you can get the puzzles on many different devices, including the iPod Touch and the iPad.

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.

version 0.1.3

The latest version of the site adds some functionality which is common for many crossword puzzle sites: the ability to get a hint by revealing a highlighted letter, word, or, if you really give up, the entire puzzle.

You can do this by using three new buttons: "show letter", "show word", and "show puzzle". The puzzle solution for the most recent puzzle is not available until one week after it has been released, so the "show puzzle" button is disabled for that puzzle. However, it is enabled for all previous puzzles.

version 0.1.2

In many web browsers, pressing the backspace key returns you to the previous web page.

I've had feedback from several users that it was confusing to have the backspace key behave this way at World of Crosswords; they would prefer that backspace be used to delete the character in the selected cell of the puzzle matrix.

So the site has been updated to behave this way - the backspace key now acts the way it would in a text editor or word processor. We hope you like this new behavior!

The new functionality has been tested in Firefox 8.0, IE 8, Chrome 15.0.874.121 m, and Safari 5.1.1, on a Windows XP machine.