word.rodeo

What a huge milestone! While I wasn't looking, a lot more people noticed this little project and started signing up for their awesome events and campaigns.

Every day I see a new project idea realized with WORD.RODEO. So far I've seen everything from happy birthday puzzle pages to corporate trainings and even political campaigns!

I'm happy that this allows me to continue to provide a fun experience for so many people all over the world!

And I can only imagine how big this project could become if I had any clue about marketing 🤞

In the past month, custom pages received more polishing than ever. Let's take a look!

Custom pages can now enable the puzzle archive, which lets players go back in time and play puzzles they may have missed. Gotta complete that wall to all tiles become green!

On the back end, some features may give you the impression that word.rodeo is becoming a Real Business (TM), with features like CSV import and now hot off the press even a Zapier integration, so you can automate your tasks even further!

Business Plan pages can now enjoy detailed statistics about their puzzles! You can see how hard or easy a particular word was!

In the customization department, some markdown formatting has been integrated for the help text and puzzle hints as well.
Check out this example I love! It's all about sports! :)

It's Feature Friday again! 🎉 Today I finally released support for colorblind assistance for our daltonic friends, and I think it looks super cool. By enabling it, you will see patterns on the letter tiles instead of just colors, helping you solve the puzzle! 🧩

Speaking of solving the puzzle - is it too easy for you? You can now enable hard mode 🔥- which requires you to re-use all your previously discovered letters, no more tricks by guessing a completely different word! 🤓

Growth has been steady but with a relatively high churn rate, as I expected from the beginning. I also received by first yearly Business subscription which is super exciting! 🥳

When I started working on word.rodeo, I didn't plan far into the future and anticipated what features I would like to add next. 🤓

Naturally, this meant that adding statistics for your played games after the fact was a little bit complicated!
But! There was a way! 💫 I have always stored game state and progress in localStorage in the browser and this would allow me to collect all your previously played games by iterating over it and calculate your game statistics this way!
If you've already played a couple of word.rodeo games by now, you can check out your statistics immediately! 🥳

Fun fact: You can't loop over localStorage, but it has a length and you can get the keys by their numerical index, allowing you to iterate over them in this weird roundabout way! 🧑‍💻

The past week saw the addition of a couple of new QOL features for the account dashboard, mostly implementing proper Tailwind UI styling for all form inputs. It instantly looks ten times more professional! 📝

And even without much marketing on my side, this small project has already grown to over $300 MRR 🥳 I've been getting a ton of feedback and my backlog is constantly growing, so I moved it to GitHub Issues instead of relying on a plain TODO file 😅

You can now define a custom dictionary with words specific to your theme or domain in the page settings, and even completely disallow regular dictionary words and force use of your own, you can try it out in my very creatively named Pokémonle: 🧩 https://word.rodeo/pokemonle/

Where each guess must be a valid Pokémon name (English)

Feedback has been great! Over 20 pages have already been created and I've reached the first milestone of $100 USD monthly recurring revenue! 🥳

Launching this week were additional new features like a countdown timer that shows you the time until the next puzzle and more sharing options, including a custom social graph image.

Launching today are custom word.rodeo puzzle pages for everyone!

I've been working hard on awesome new features and getting requests from quite a lot of people and companies, asking for a customized website for creating your own Wordle style puzzle pages. Well now you can, I launched it as a small subscription service thanks to the awesome #lowcode integration offered by Stripe!

You can schedule unlimited puzzles, customize colors and upload your own logo!

Get yours 👉 https://word.rodeo/signup/

This weekend was a test to see how many awesome features I could possibly add to word.rodeo.

The first thing I wanted to try is signing up for some Chrome Origin Trials to enable experimental features like Declarative Link Capturing and Launch Handler (which replaces the former in Chrome 98) to launch an installed PWA when clicking a matching link.
I don't know if I succeeded in implementing this, but on Android I was able to enable the PWA to open links manually by registering it as a default handler for the domain, but this option might've been there from the start anyway.

Many people like to play on 'easy' mode and just mash random keys into the puzzle to see which letters stick. To prevent this I added a dictionary lookup for some languages that will prevent that if the option was enabled. This even works offline (after you downloaded the dictionary at least once)!

Next was more offline capabilities. You can now create and share your puzzles even while sitting in an airplane, thanks to cache storage and sharing via a QR code that you can display!

It was inevitable, there was a dark mode to be added. So I did just that. Thanks to Tailwind CSS this was a breeze.

A good friend of mine played the game on his live stream for the first time and let's just say we got an awesome reaction out of it.

https://www.twitch.tv/matty_twoshoes/clip/DependableAstuteNikudonFailFish-tnTb0-GZ8NTU0_Ic

I nerd sniped myself with this fun weekend project so much that I couldn't stop adding features to it.

The game will now encrypt the URL so you can't easily guess the word by Base64-decoding it (thanks to the SubtleCrypto browser APIs this wasn't too difficult). 🔒

I also added multiple keyboards so you can enter words in different languages. 🇺🇸 🇩🇪 🇫🇷 🇵🇱