First impressions of new club site

Author   petebiddlecombePosted on Categories Announcement
Modified rapture here:

The simpler front page is a step forward from the previous one with its various links and buttons. Searching is considerably improved but the function of the “keyword” option is a mystery to me.

Puzzle printing: The daily puzzle still fits on one page for me, but: The grey bar at the top now used for all the puzzle names, numbers and dates has such tiny print that the header added by the browser is bigger. When a puzzle needs extra information, this appears on its own in big print – in some cases, like “by Paul McKenna” for the current Mephisto, this looks rather odd. The daily puzzle grid is bigger but blocks are still solid black, so will use more ink. Clue printing is now in Arial or a similar sanserif font instead of the serif font that was used before, and they still can’t format the clues so that the clue numbers are the only information in their column (which they’ve managed in the paper since puzzle no. 1). Printed Mephisto and Listener grids are still not as clear as the blocked grids.

Doing cryptics online: had a brief go but won’t be bothering with this as a rule – you still have to enter the whole of each answer rather than just the letters not filled in yet (as in Race the Clock). Still no cryptic Race the Clock either. That said, you can partly finish a puzzle online and print it with your answers printed, courtesy of an epic URL. As with Race the Clock, they’ve tweaked the colours to fit the “Times Online” black/blue/green/white look.

The vintage puzzles (not updated for a year or so) now seem to have been removed completely. Probably not a big issue for most solvers, but it would have been polite of them to say so.

(A copy of this is going to the feedback address they give on the site. I’d encourage you to use this for your feedback too.)

8 comments on “First impressions of new club site”

  1. I haven’t spent long looking at the new site, but the keyword button will be useful for finding listeners now that the listing doesn’t show puzzle and setter names. So far as I can see, the keyword button does a string search in those names.

    So for example, a keyword search on “ave” finds not only the puzzle “Ave Atque Vale”, but other puzzles like “Travel Agents”. And it also throws up all puzzles by Tea-leaves, Machiavelli and Dave.

  2. So there I was, all geared up for a good old rant, and the whole thing went off disappointingly smoothly. It’s not exactly the day that shook the world.

    My only grumble is about the typeface for the clues, which is indeed Arial, that king of vapidity. Old grouches like me can still view and print the crossword in the old typeface (in Firefox) by temporarily unchecking the “Allow websites to choose their own fonts” option. If you have your default font as Times New Roman, that’s how it will be displayed. I don’t know why they changed it. What do they use in the print version these days?

  3. A great new (unintentional) feature is that if you bookmark the crossword, that bookmark will always bring up the latest crossword. (It changes at midnight GMT). So no need to sign on. Just right click and select add to favourites. I suspect that this will also work for the Saturday cryptic, the Saturday jumbo and the Sunday Times.

    Also, the old style back door entry still works:

    http://www.timesonline.co.uk/crosswords/printOnly/1,,,00.html?linkName=&linkType=&crosswordID=&day=28&month=1&year=2009&type=1

    and brings up the crossword in the old format.

  4. Scrub that good news entry. They have shut the door so that you DO have to sign in. But the old way still seems OK.
  5. I printed yesterday’s puzzle at work when the new version went live and it required two pages. The font was quite large, 14 pt I would guess. This morning’s printed at home fitted to one page and the font was smaller, 10 or 11 pt maybe. I wondered if they had responded to complaints sent yesterday so I checked on arrival at work, but it still needed two pages because of the larger font. I guess it’s down to local settings but I’d have thought it would be possible for them to standardise it, as I have never experienced this problem before the changes.
  6. I found that with IE you can get it to print on one page if you first set the font size (via View>Set Font Size>Smallest). But the grid is still big and ugly — and can’t be pasted into Word to adjust.

    This was the one thing that worked well in the previous version. Why the heck did they have to change it? Why can’t they understand that this is the kind of thing that matters to their paying customers? Don’t they get real-life crossword solvers to test out their site?

    …Robert

    1. It says on the bulletin board that it will print out on to one page if you use IE7 or Firefox 3. As you point out, it does work in IE6 (which is seven years old now!) if you change the text size.

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