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clutu is a crossword game you can play online with your friends. I've been working on it every evening and a couple of weekends for six weeks now, after being

clutu is a crossword game you can play online with your friends. I've been working on it every evening and a couple of weekends for six weeks now, after being inspired by counttonine.com If you want to play clutu fast, you can instantly see what your friends are doing thanks to ajax. If you prefer to play slower you can bookmark your game and/or subscribe to an rss feed for it. clutu runs in sbcl, using hunchentoot as its web server, on an ubuntu vps. Crosswords are generated continuously and the best ones are kept in a pool so that a request for a new game is quick if the pool isn't empty. Most fun thing so far: finding a very fast way to generate anagrams. Least fun thing so far: trying to get invite emails past spam filters - I spent more than a week on this and it's still not reliable. Thanks for any feedback!

ph0rque 19y ago
Looks good! Random thoughts: -I know I've been docked for saying this before, but a facebook app that ties in with your site might be a good way to virally grow the user base. -My first reaction to the site's name was a play on Cthulhu: you might want to capitalize on that and make a (dyslexic?) cthulhu be the site's mascot. -An idea for crossword generation is to take the top stories on reddit and make crosswords be based on key words (and their clues) from the stories.
- ujeezy 19y ago
  Yeah, my first thought was: Facebook app it! A good tie in might be to generate crosswords based on your friends' names, and make the clues be based on their interests, wall posts, or something like that. Hmm, actually this sounds interesting, give me a holler if you'd like a collaborator ;)
brlewis 19y ago
Overall looks great. Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't. Other than that it seemed smooth. I don't think there's a reliable route past spam filters for any kind of web-site invite. You might give users some text to cut/paste into their own email to friends.
- abstractbill 19y ago
  Thanks. I really should have noted that you can just cut and paste the url of you game and send that to your friends if the emails don't get through. "Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't" I've never seen this myself - what browser/os? Thanks again.
  - brlewis 19y ago
    I observed the bug on Firefox/XP. The only reliable way I could reproduce it was to move the mouse slightly so that the letter was briefly selected when I clicked. It might be a case of just moving quickly/selecting. I think it might sometimes happen apart from that, but it's possible that it's the same thing but with deselection happening quickly.
    - abstractbill 19y ago
      Thanks, that's great info.

ph0rque 19y ago

Looks good! Random thoughts: -I know I've been docked for saying this before, but a facebook app that ties in with your site might be a good way to virally grow the user base. -My first reaction to the site's name was a play on Cthulhu: you might want to capitalize on that and make a (dyslexic?) cthulhu be the site's mascot. -An idea for crossword generation is to take the top stories on reddit and make crosswords be based on key words (and their clues) from the stories.

ujeezy 19y ago
Yeah, my first thought was: Facebook app it! A good tie in might be to generate crosswords based on your friends' names, and make the clues be based on their interests, wall posts, or something like that. Hmm, actually this sounds interesting, give me a holler if you'd like a collaborator ;)

brlewis 19y ago

Overall looks great. Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't. Other than that it seemed smooth. I don't think there's a reliable route past spam filters for any kind of web-site invite. You might give users some text to cut/paste into their own email to friends.

abstractbill 19y ago
Thanks. I really should have noted that you can just cut and paste the url of you game and send that to your friends if the emails don't get through. "Sometimes single-clicking on a square made that square get the next letter typed, sometimes it didn't" I've never seen this myself - what browser/os? Thanks again.
- brlewis 19y ago
  I observed the bug on Firefox/XP. The only reliable way I could reproduce it was to move the mouse slightly so that the letter was briefly selected when I clicked. It might be a case of just moving quickly/selecting. I think it might sometimes happen apart from that, but it's possible that it's the same thing but with deselection happening quickly.
  - abstractbill 19y ago
    Thanks, that's great info.