daily clue

I made my first cryptic in September last year. It took me about a week and is… decent? The surfaces are not amazing but the cryptic grammar is ok.

For the last month or so I’ve been working on my second puzzle (will update with a link when done), and putting a lot more effort into it. I’ve been reading up on cryptic construction theory, asking lots of questions on Crosscord, and giving my puzzle a lot of space to breathe and sit and percolate through my head. While giving the puzzle space to sit so I can approach it fresh is definitely a good move, writing regular cryptic clues is also helpful for my future constructing abilities, and I thought it’d be a fun project to make a daily¹ one.

I asked and searched around, but there wasn’t an open source project that I could find which was well suited to this, and there was at least some interest in something like that existing, beyond my own. So I started this project, and you can see today’s clue on my front page. I may expand the code eventually to be a fully open source crossword embed tool, but that may a take a while.

So far I’ve generally made my clue shortly before midnight in somewhat of a rush, but I’m hoping to get a bit of a backlog going, this would both give me good fodder for daily clues, as well as setting those ones I’m particularly happy with aside for future full puzzles.