We’ve been doing some late “spring cleaning” around GMPuzzles, editing some Giant puzzles and e-books for our patrons. Our next week of puzzles will start on July 18th with two variations that have appeared on recent United States Puzzles Championships.
This weekend is the US round for the WPF Puzzle Grand Prix. It features a lot of puzzles from me and other GMPuzzles contributors including a special “Escape the Grand Prix” casual section. Please check it out.
We’re working to compile our Best of 2015 puzzles this week and will return after the new year with those posts.
People looking for new puzzles from me should check out next weekend’s Puzzle Grand Prix. Many USPC contributors (and therefore many GMPuzzles contributors) have written puzzles. I’ve made LITS and Shape Minesweeper sections; Serkan Yürekli has made some Kakuro; Roger Barkan (author of the Colossal Cave Collection) has made some Caves.
There are still no solvers of the Hidden Contest.
I continue working through my transition; while I’ve been at my new job for a month, I only just found my permanent residence in CA for this year and will move in next weekend. Still a lot to do before I see the time returning to do much with GMPuzzles.
We’ve extended the hidden contest for at least two more weeks and added another hint for it.
Besides this hidden contest, there will likely be no new puzzles on the site until May, and a return to a regular schedule will probably still be some time after that. I’ll be using some of this time to close out lots of things that have been pushed back because of the demands of meeting a weekly posting schedule, including the print edition of The Art of Puzzles, the print and electronic editions of The Art of Puzzles 2: Double Trouble, as well as the #1 Fans puzzle promised to our patrons long ago. Thanks again for your patience.
I wanted to share some life/site news with you all. Tomorrow I’m starting a new job at Google with their Life Sciences team. I just drove back to California for this unique opportunity, but I am quite far from being settled in.
As a result of this life change, I’m going to be taking an indefinite break from posting regular puzzles here. There may be a few random puzzles posted during this gap, but this past week was the last full week for awhile.
In the interim, there is still an open contest to solve (with a new hint).
And for most of you, there are still hundreds of past puzzles to look through. I’ve made a new archive page where you can readily download everything we’ve posted.
— Dr. S.
The advertised “stats” update for 2014 will be coming later, but I did want to follow up on several requests from readers for the new year.
– I’ve already posted about our site navigation changes for 2015 but I wanted to mention again the new sidebar/”posts by category” and “posts by author” bits and make sure solvers are finding this to be an improvement.
– We received many requests for a way to distinguish the PDF files in a week as they sometimes get mixed after printing; we’re now adding the posting date to the top of all PDFs in 2015 which should help track things better.
– The biggest open ticket to address is a way to track the puzzles you’ve solved. Here I have to rely on our web developer at the moment so I can’t promise you any timeline, but I hear the request loud and clear. We’ll work through the challenges of merging the solving data with a representative calendar of our site posts and have something available as soon as possible.
– We’ll be adding some new puzzlemasters this year, but I won’t tell you who or when yet. That will be a surprise.
– Also on the horizon for early this year are some improvements to our estore, including more titles there (that only our patrons have seen), and a new header for the blog.
Now that we are doing so many things with daily puzzles and monthly ebooks and other collections, it is time to bring on some more freelancers to help with the site and with our books. There are projects that simply cannot move fast enough because I don’t have the time to complete them myself. Our most pressing need is for an artist that can create covers for our book collections. We’re looking for clean, professional art that showcases how special our puzzles are, with our The Art of Sudoku cover being a prime example. If you think you might be the person to help us with that, please contact us.
During these “gap” weeks I like to make updates to the website and WordPress. This morning you’ll notice a real change to the navigation on the sidebar which categorizes our many posts into puzzle genres. This should be much easier to use to find some of the less common puzzles. For instance, Grant’s Ripple Effect that was highlighted as a “Best Of …” yesterday before could only be found by searching deep in the Puzzle or Variation categories. Now it is cleanly with a handful of others in “Other Number Placement”.
There is also now a set of hard links to the different puzzle authors, which makes a hidden feature a lot more obvious.
This update did change our blog’s style.css sheet so you may need to do a hard refresh of the page for everything to display as intended.
Please come back later today for the first in our “Best of 2014” entries. Our supercomputers (read: Thomas, working with a spreadsheet and some graphs) are crunching the numbers as we speak to bring you this exciting summary of the last year at Grandmaster Puzzles.
While the last week of posts covered the best of 2013 and some things to look forward to in 2014, I wanted to make a separate post about funding the site going forward.
To this point, our website has been free; but you must recognize that most of the puzzlemakers here have been blogging for years with very little reward for their work besides your thanks in comments. I set one year after launch as a point to have a discussion on when and if things should change from “free” to something else. I’ve dismissed for now adding either advertisements (unlikely to make much money) or registration costs (unlikely to let us continue to grow users) as a means of getting support for our puzzle writing. However, I’ve strongly considered going to a patronage system where people who want to support us have an easy outlet to do so. This is sometimes a “Tip Jar” on websites, but I don’t know that that is as effective as it could be. I’ve been interested in trying out new systems to directly reward devoted fans and also tap into social networks a bit more; to this end, we now have a Patreon page for people who want to contribute funds for our puzzlemaking.
The general idea of Patreon is to support creative people in a world where fewer and fewer content providers want to pay for quality work. Instead of supporting one big project, like Kickstarter and Indiegogo do, the goal at Patreon is to get patrons to support an artist as he/she continues to put out work. In our case, every time we deliver a month of puzzles, we would get some support from each of our patrons. This would help us reimburse our authors and pay for our website to keep running.
To encourage patronage, we have also set up some rewards. These include early access to puzzles, solution images, puzzle walkthroughs (one of our most unique features that we want to start doing regularly again), and even bonus puzzles or custom puzzles from our puzzlemasters. This bonus content will only be available to our supporters. When I spoke about monthly “Puzzle Packs” in the last post, I should have mentioned that the easiest way to get everything we do at Grandmaster Puzzles in 2014 is going to be to support us at Patreon at the Grandmaster level. Consider it a subscription to all the content we ever release as every PDF book we put out in a given month will go to supporters at that level during that month. Patreon recently added PayPal support, which should make it much more accessible for some of our solvers to consider funding us.
We realize this is a new idea — for us and for you — but we’d like you to consider what you get out of Grandmaster Puzzles and if you’d be willing to help it keep growing. We’re not putting up any paywall or ads; we’ll still have an (almost) daily puzzle here for awhile for anyone who wants to browse our site. But we can be bigger and better with your help. So please check us out over at Patreon.
-Thomas, writing for all of the contributors to GMPuzzles