By my count, there are at least eight venues alone which provide daily or almost-daily puzzles (CrosSynergy, the LA Times, Newsday, the New York Sun, the New York Times, Tribune Media Service, Universal Press Syndicate, and USA Today), and there are at least eight others which provide weekly puzzles (the Boston Globe, the Chronicle Of Higher Education, I Swear! Crosswords, Jonesin' Syndicate, the Onion AV Club, the Philadelphia Inquirer, the Village Voice, the Wall Street Journal). This is far too many for me to cover on a weekly basis, so I had to pick and choose. Here are some arbitrary guidelines by which I based my decision:
1. The puzzles must be available in downloadable .puz format. This is so that I can have copies of the puzzles readily at hand should I need to refer back to them when writing the weekly summaries. This excludes Jonesin', Newsday, Tribune Media Services, the Universal Press Syndicate, and USA Today (though if it turns out the latter two are available for downloading somewhere, feel free to forget to tell me). In addition, I think the LA Times puzzles will only be available to me for as long as my Gold Membership to www.cruciverb.com lasts; when it lapses, I may or may not renew it, I haven't decided yet.
2. The puzzles must be geared toward a "general audience". This excludes the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Onion AV Club, I Swear! Crosswords, and the Village Voice. This is so I can more consistently rate the themes; some themes that work in the Onion would not work in the Times, and vice versa. Similarly for the other venues. I've decided not to include the WSJ in this set because it frequently runs non-business-related themes, and the ones it does run aren't so technical as to put off the less-business-savvy solver. Plus, I wanted to have more than two Sunday-sized puzzles to review.
3. The puzzles must be created by a variety of constructors. This excludes the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer. This is because I figure if I'm going to offend and alienate constructors with this blog, I might as well offend and alienate as many constructors as I can. (Just kidding! Or am I? Yes, I am. The actual reason is that I needed an excuse to whittle down the list of puzzles a bit more.)
This leaves the following five venues which I will be reviewing: CrosSynergy, the LA Times, the New York Sun, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I should note that I do enjoy a fair portion of the other puzzle venues I've just mentioned. I particularly recommend the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chronicle Of Higher Education for those of you who aren't already doing them regularly.
Jeffrey
P.S. You know what? I think I'm going to stop signing my posts now. I think you all know it's me, and I'm not the regent of a puzzle-nation like Rex, so it looks kind of weak in comparison.
1. The puzzles must be available in downloadable .puz format. This is so that I can have copies of the puzzles readily at hand should I need to refer back to them when writing the weekly summaries. This excludes Jonesin', Newsday, Tribune Media Services, the Universal Press Syndicate, and USA Today (though if it turns out the latter two are available for downloading somewhere, feel free to forget to tell me). In addition, I think the LA Times puzzles will only be available to me for as long as my Gold Membership to www.cruciverb.com lasts; when it lapses, I may or may not renew it, I haven't decided yet.
2. The puzzles must be geared toward a "general audience". This excludes the Chronicle Of Higher Education, Onion AV Club, I Swear! Crosswords, and the Village Voice. This is so I can more consistently rate the themes; some themes that work in the Onion would not work in the Times, and vice versa. Similarly for the other venues. I've decided not to include the WSJ in this set because it frequently runs non-business-related themes, and the ones it does run aren't so technical as to put off the less-business-savvy solver. Plus, I wanted to have more than two Sunday-sized puzzles to review.
3. The puzzles must be created by a variety of constructors. This excludes the Boston Globe and the Philadelphia Inquirer. This is because I figure if I'm going to offend and alienate constructors with this blog, I might as well offend and alienate as many constructors as I can. (Just kidding! Or am I? Yes, I am. The actual reason is that I needed an excuse to whittle down the list of puzzles a bit more.)
This leaves the following five venues which I will be reviewing: CrosSynergy, the LA Times, the New York Sun, the New York Times, and the Wall Street Journal. I should note that I do enjoy a fair portion of the other puzzle venues I've just mentioned. I particularly recommend the Philadelphia Inquirer and the Chronicle Of Higher Education for those of you who aren't already doing them regularly.
Jeffrey
P.S. You know what? I think I'm going to stop signing my posts now. I think you all know it's me, and I'm not the regent of a puzzle-nation like Rex, so it looks kind of weak in comparison.
4 comments:
I believe the LA Times puzzles are available in Across Lite to anyone with a Cruciverb account, paid or un.
Ah, OK. Thanks for the info.
I know you said feel free to forget to tell you, but I'm going to tell you anyway that I have a program that converts Flash puzzles (the applet used by all the puzzles on the LAT's puzzle page, USA Today, Universal, the Mon-Sat Tribune Media Services puzzles from the Chicago Tribune site, and maybe others I don't follow) to AcrossLite .txt files. So, if you ever do want to cover any of those puzzles, it could be done.
I know you probably don't want to cover any of them regularly (there's enough work involved in covering the ones you have chosen), but it might be interesting to throw one or more of those others into the mix once in a while.
Wow! That's really cool. The LAT puzzles are available in .puz format already...is the program user-friendly? Could someone like me who still has trouble getting the font size on his blog posts right use it?
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