CryptoCrosswords

After a little delay the next puzzle is ready to go.

I'm realizing I need to shift my focus more from content creation and coding, to driving traffic. This project was a lot of fun to work on when I could just mind my own business and create the interface.

But now success hinges on reaching the right people, growing my email list, and getting more traffic.

I'm far less comfortable with driving this growth than coding the project.

What to work on next? I think my main focus is to write articles for:

• Reddit posts
• Hacker News
• NXTer Magazine
• Jelurida weekly updates
• Medium articles
• More consistent Twitter posts
• Crossword forums

What other ways could I drive traffic? Not interested in paying for ads at this point...

Released the first case a few days ago.

Had no idea how long it would take for someone to solve it.

The prize was claimed in.... about 35 minutes!

I can't decide if this is a success or not. On the one hand, people were at least interested enough to immediately go to my site, work on the puzzle, and see it through to completion.

On the other hand, maybe the puzzles are too easy? If I send it to a mailing list of 10 people, 4 people open the email, all of them click through to the puzzle, and one solves it in 35 minutes, do I need to make it harder?

I'm planning on running a few more weekly prize puzzles to get more data.

Today is the day I released the first real puzzle!

I had gotten some support from a few cryptocurrency fanatics who were happy to see me building on their platform. They helped me set up a community fundraiser and donated some starting funds. Super nice of them to provide money for the first few puzzles.

True to my word, I released it first to the 12 email subscribers.

Now its being released elsewhere.

The reward is 250 Ignis, which is currently worth about $10 USD.

Its not a ton of money but we'll see how many people it attracts.

Not sure how long its going to take for people to solve this... The fastest experts can solve a crossword in about 5-10 minutes. I doubt any of them are aware of my site at this point, so I'm thinking anywhere from a few hours to a few days.

If you want to try it out, its on the homepage now: www.cryptocrosswords.com

We'll see what happens!

I got some feedback that no matter how good of an interface I create, puzzle fanatics will always want to solve it on paper.

Ok, fine.

I created a printer-friendly version of the puzzle. It was pretty simple... just take a screenshot of the grid and paste it into a word document. Copy/paste the clues into a 3-column layout below it.

Took the Word document and selected "Print to PDF".

Now users can print out a copy of it, solve it on paper, and navigate back to the website to submit it!

I created a sample puzzle on the site that rewarded users with TestNet tokens (not actual value). This was released to a few community members in the Ardor community. I figured they would be more forgiving and receptive than crossword fanatics at first.

A few of them actually solved the puzzle!

The TestNet puzzles only reward the user with a small fraction of the funds in the wallet. This became an issue because once someone had solved the puzzle, they had the password and could drain the entire wallet. Sure enough, someone did.

It was kind of irritating but expected... the users at that point were extremely tech savvy and very familiar with the platform. I didn't help my cause by having a console.log(password) in my code, so a simple glance in the developer tools revealed the password.

The actual puzzles will be winner-take-all, so this shouldn't be an issue.

I got a free MailChimp account, and added a signup to the page. I wasn't sure if anyone would actually want to be on the mailing list. I decided to incentivize this by promising that email subscribers would get the new puzzles first.

A head start in the race to a financial reward is a big advantage.

Sure enough, 12 people signed up for the mailing list! The only place I wrote it about it was in an Ardor Slack group. No real advertising.

To be honest, 2 of those signups were me. So more like 10. But I considered it a small success.

At this point I had a simple product that was up and running. I could now reach out to a few people and have them use the site. I got great feedback from these beta testers.

1. How do I get a wallet? It wasn't clear to them how to get an Ardor wallet to receive the funds once they solved it. Easy fix, just add a link to the wallet creation page.

In the future I want to build this directly into CryptoCrosswords.

2. How do I know if I solved it right? In keeping with the theme of making the site as simple as possible, I added in some basic error handling. The site now gives simple alerts based on what the user is attempting to submit to the API.

3. Can you make the interface better? This has been the hardest issue for me. Most crossword sites let the user focus on one specific word, highlight it in a color, and only display the clue for that word.

I have yet to solve this problem. Not sure I have the technical knowledge to do this yet.

With a crossword puzzle that looked relatively normal, I now had to add in the functionality with Javascript. This was slightly more complicated than I realized.

Each input consisted of one letter, and the inputs for the entire puzzle were concatenated together to make the password.

This password is then passed to the API. Unfortunately I had to process the data quite a bit, and the only way I could figure out how to do this was with a few node packages. I wanted to build the website as simple as possible, and had not even learned much about a backend yet, so I was stumped.

After some searching, I found Browserify.

Browserify solved the exact problem I was facing. After integrating it, I was able to include the node packages I needed. With some extra troubleshooting, I was able to make the 2 basic API calls I needed.

After ensuring I had a platform that could support my idea, I started building the crossword interface. This proved to be slightly more difficult than I anticipated.

To keep this as simple as possible, I wanted to keep it to HTML, CSS, and vanilla Javascript. While I haven't been able to stick completely to that goal, it still is relatively simple.

I used CSS Grid to build a... grid that is 13x13. There are three different types of squares on a crossword puzzle that I was able to replicate:

1. Black box
2. Empty box
3. Empty box with a number

The black boxes are simply colored black with CSS, and the empty boxes have an input form. The form automatically limits the input to one capital letter.

This gave me a result that looked pretty close to a real crossword.

After having the idea for CryptoCrosswords, I needed to find a platform that could support the idea. I felt confident that I could build the simple web interface with the HTML, CSS and Javascript skills I had learned from the class I was taking.

I had learned how to make API calls as well. I knew I needed to find a platform with good APIs that could support what I wanted to do.

There are only 2 things I needed to do:

1. Make a GET request to display the current balance (aka reward)
2. Make a POST request to submit a transaction

After considering a few options, I decided to build the first iteration on Ardor. Their APIs were easiest to understand as a beginner.

Another important piece was the fact that I could create a wallet with a custom password. The solution to the crossword would eventually become the custom password to that wallet.

I was taking Colt Steele's Web Development Bootcamp on Udemy. After taking the first half of the class, I wanted to challenge myself to build a simple but useful web app. The cryptocurrency ICO phase was over but I was still interested in the topic, so I decided to do something in that space.

I was interested in crossword puzzles as well, and had worked on solving some basic word and number games (think: Sudoku, word searches, etc...) that revealed a password that unlocked a monetary prize. However, these puzzles were done on paper and required navigation to an obscure cryptocurrency wallet to submit.

This led me to the idea for CryptoCrosswords.

The goal is build a simple and easy user interface that allows anyone to solve a crossword and be rewarded with a cryptocurrency.