Various Crossword Nexus Updates

Happy ACPT to all who celebrate! We’ve been hard at work here at Crossword Nexus HQ on some stuff; this is a roundup of what we’ve been doing.

• Patreon! You probably knew we had a Patreon, but maybe you haven’t joined for whatever reason. That’s fine! Money is finite and you can’t just go spending it willy-nilly. But we also have a free tier, and it would help us out tremendously if you joined it. Patreon’s algorithm, like YouTube’s, likes to promote people with lots of followers, so the more we get the merrier. If you’ve been wanting to support the site but didn’t know how, this is a great way to do it! And as a bonus …
  • Cruxword! Cruxword is a free daily word game where you have to guess the top words from clues for a given crossword entry. It’s especially fun if you have a group of crossword-minded people to do it with, which you might this weekend, maybe?
  • Patreon Tools – we’ve started to build out advanced, ad-free versions of some of our more popular tools as a thank you for our paid patrons. If you’ve used Double Occupancy or the Wikipedia Search in the past, you might like the new versions better.
• Umiaq! You may remember our previous attempts at making the word-search tool Umiaq. First we had a Python script which wasn’t very user-friendly. Then we had a web-based version which was more user-friendly but quite slow. Now we’ve got the best of both worlds — a fast, online version that’s loaded with bells and whistles. Check it out! https://crossword-nexus.github.io/umiaq/
• Mechapuzzle! Do you remember our online interface for helping dissect meta-puzzles? Well, it’s still there, but it’s much prettier now.

Oh, and we of course continue to make puzzles occasionally. We recently made a celebratory acrostic. It came out good! You should try it. Check it out here.

However you support this site, whether it’s supporting our Patreon or just simply reading this blog, we appreciate it!