Category Archives: Projects

Slicehost

Editorial Note: This is my 100th post. Thanks for reading. Today, I signed up for a VPS at Slicehost. This is my first time dealing with them, and so far I’m very happy. I did encounter a fair number of … Continue reading

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Quirksmode

Today I fixed several browser-specific bugs affecting my puzzles. I want to discuss them, briefly, as they took a while to track down, and so seem to merit comment.

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Puzzle UI

Today I released a minor UI enhancement for my Kenken-style puzzles; you can now navigate around the playfield using the arrow keys. This is a small thing, but I think it helps the game flow much better.

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Adwords Aggravation

My experience with Adwords continues to prove frustrating. My gambit of advertising the solver instead of the puzzles appears to be working, at least insofar as the solver is assigned a merely dismal Quality Score of 4 (for the “KenKen” … Continue reading

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Difficulty

While generating KenKen-style puzzles for my site, I’ve come head-to-head with a somewhat surprising axiom: It’s pretty simple to make an easy game harder, but pretty difficult to make a hard game easier.

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Adwords’ Quality Score

My initial experiments with AdWords have revealed the importance, and capriciousness, of Google Adwords’ “Quality Score”. This number seems to have a great impact on the cost and success of one’s advertising campaign, but its provenance is obscure.

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An Experiment

Editorial Note: I’m continuing the daily posting schedule into April, but I’m changing the format slightly; on weekdays, I will be posting updates on my new project (discussed below), while weekends will be devoted to more general musings. I’m going … Continue reading

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WordPress Backups (con’t)

This is a quick addenda to yesterday’s notes on backing up self-hosted WordPress blogs. I noticed that I neglected to make the scripts I described available as downloads, and that I didn’t illustrate the final piece of the puzzle: a … Continue reading

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WordPress Backups

If you run a self-hosted WordPress Blog, it’s probably a good idea to back it up now and again. Here I present some code that I use to back up my blog to Amazon’s S3 service, which might help you … Continue reading

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KenKen Puzzles

I’ve spent a lot of time discussing the construction of a solver for KenKen puzzles. Most people, of course, prefer to play these puzzles. To that end, I present a collection of roughly 1000 KenKen-style puzzles, available here.

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