Welcome, everyone, to the new Times for The Times!

Author   vinyl1Posted on Categories Announcement

I would like to thank everyone for their patience.   The grand opening of our new site is finally here, and our community on Live Journal is no more.

If you would like to register here, you will find the appropriate instructions under Help/User Tips in the menu at the top of the page.   As before, registration is free,  and anonymous comments are still permitted.

As you look around the new site, you may be surprised to see many months of content, extending back to October of 2006.   Yes, we have loaded in every single  post from Live Journal, including the comments.   So we are starting in this new location with almost 10,000 posts and over 300,000 comments.   We have tried to make the site as seamless as possible; for example, if you click on the name of a current blogger, you will see every post by that blogger going back to their very first blog.

It certainly has been a long effort.   We started working on this site in early March,  and for the past two weeks the bloggers have been posting their blogs to both sites as the development team continued to work on the final touches.   Our development team consisted of Johninterred, Starstruck_au, and me, with Jackkt as the lead tester.

We have tried to keep as many of the useful features of Live Journal as possible, as well as making the site look very similar to what we had before.

So how do you like our new site?

** Update** – I have sent email invitations to 548 addresses, and gotten back only 7 undeliverable messages, as well as 2 out-of-office replies.

132 comments on “Welcome, everyone, to the new Times for The Times!”

  2. Thank you for the new site. It looks excellent. I used the old site every day and will do the same now with the new one.

  3. Hi. Excited for the new site. It looks amazing. Thanks to all involved for all the hard work and I look forward to much enlightenment as I try to solve the puzzles. Will the weekend QC ones appear too? Are they still in the same place? Glad to see the back of the Russian ads!

  4. Absolutely great effort. Thanks very much to Vinyl, Johninterred, Starstruck_au and Jackkt for all your hard work.

  5. At risk of sounding unoriginal, huge congratulations to all concerned in bringing the new site to life. Great work.

  6. I have only recently started doing cryptic crosswords and find that the Times Quick Cryptic is at a perfect level for me. I don’t usually finish until the evening – or sometimes the next day – because I do it in short bursts during breaks from work. I always come to the blog when I have finished, or given up, to get explanations of the parsing that I didn’t understand I have been improving my skills by going back through past issues of the QC, so I am very grateful indeed to the migration team for bringing across all the past entries and comments. Thank you very much.

  7. Great achievement in such a short time. All looks very clean and neat, and I’ll soon get used to the more “spaced out” feel.

  9. Congratulations on the new site. What a smooth transition too. Thank you all!

  12. Splendid work everyone. I especially appreciate having all the early entries as I am working my way through pre 2015 puzzles on the club site and often look at the blog for that day to see the comments.

  13. Gosh this is amazing! Well done all involved. I found LJ quite clunky – perhaps as I always access via my phone – but this site is like a shiny new toy. Thanks all.

  14. Thank you to everyone involved what a great effort – worthy of a few lines in the paper perhaps?

  15. Many thanks to everyone involved for your splendid hard work in setting up the new site.

  16. A huge thanks to Vinyl, Johninterred, Starstruck_au and Jackkt. Fantastic effort and the new site looks great.

  17. Many congratulations to all who have created this site, and huge thanks. I look forward to returning to (semi-) regular posting.

    Best wishes to all
    Cedric

  18. Thank you all for preserving and continuing this wonderful website and the community that goes with it. I much look forward to continue reading, and just occasionally posting a comment.

    3. I love your effusiveness-ness, Mr DH. Good to hear from you again.

      1. Thank-you Mr. Somerset (and others) for the note! I must say – for a dedicated member of the SCC you are ever cheerful and never, ever dull! My regards to Mrs. Somerset – long may she prevail! Meldrew

        1. Rest assured, Mr H. Mrs R will always prevail. Her adept-ness with words and her position in the Random household means that I will forever be playing catch-up.

  20. Well done all! It has a really nice look and a good feel too. I stand in admiration and look forward to living up to the much improved site

  21. Well done to everyone involved in this – esp impressive that all the previous material was able to be transferred to the new site.

  23. I did not find the set up process that easy and despite registering I got no email. However all fine now and thanks to all those who made it possible.

  24. Very well done all concerned – looks very professional! Aware that my contributions have dried up this year and in fact I don’t tackle the QC and 15×15 every day, as I used to. Hoping that things will improve in due course. Meantime many thanks for what must have been a lot of hard graft and keep up the good work!

  25. I can’t add to what has already been said but I am massively in awe at how much time and effort this must have taken. It really is very much appreciated

  26. Hello, how nice to see you all again! My “further education” can now continue. Congrats and thanks to the team who made it possible. Cheers, all.

  27. This is a test post, to see if my (slightly updated) avatar has been accepted and in readiness for tomorrow’s back-to-business.

    P.S. I wonder if anyone can work out the location of the photo. To do so, you would have to zoom in to the well-known local landmark on the top of the hill in the distance. The photo is taken looking West, and the overhanging tree in the foreground is a Holm Oak. I walk underneath it several times every week.

  28. Many congratulations to those who have achieved an extraordinary feat. Now, I have a confession to make; I never dared to register for the original blog as I was frankly pretty bothered about its hosting. I always posted as anonymous for that reason. So here I am as me instead, and perhaps I will now get better at solving, too! PS: I haven’t had any confirmation yet either.

    1. Sorry to reply to my own post, but I have found my confirmation email (for which many thanks) which had ended up in a spam trap I rarely check. So if anyone else can’t find their confirmation do remind them to check all their spam folders.

  29. Brilliant. Many thanks to vinyl1 and the team for all their efforts in sorting this out.
    Can anyone advise on deleting my lj profile?

    1. If you don’t user Livejournal for anything else you can safely delete your account there – the new site is completely independent of Livejournal.

  30. Also many thanks for the new blog. As someone who does the syndicated puzzle, a few weeks behind and with different puzzle numbers, I tried the search feature to locate the older blog I wanted and it worked well. I wondered why the new super-sized spaced-out format. Is it because of people’s presumed failing eyesight or is it forced by the platform? It means a clever clue or interesting comment doesn’t copy well into an email and there’s a lot of scrolling. Is some compaction a possible enhancement? No biggie if not.

    1. The layout is determined by the “theme” the site is based on, but it has already been tweaked a little. Reducing the amount of padding in places is on the list of potential enhancements, but I’ll wait awhile to collect other feedback before making any changes.

  32. Hi Jonathan

    This has a very attractive clean look to it.
    It is going to make me want to resubscribe to The Times- if only for the crossword and this erudite community.

    Best

    Andrew

  33. A tremendous achievement – sincere thanks to all involved.
    I din’t receive an email as BobK34059 (I have checked the junk folders and ISP spam trap) but I have successfully registered and logged in.

  37. Looks great, well done guys.

    I hate to be the one critical voice here, but where are the ads in Cyrillic? And those ones offering to help with my earwax problem? Just a temporary glitch I hope

    1. Oh dear. Very remiss on my part. I can put it on the “potential enhancements” list if you like 😉

  40. Fantastic job guys! And brilliant that you managed to preserve all the history.

  42. Just wanted to add my thanks for all your effort, prefer this to the old site in so many ways!

  43. Many thanks to all involved for your hard work. The new site looks great. Looking forward to continuing to be a part of this delightful community.

  44. Jonathan, you have been instrumental in all this and I hope you recognise how grateful we all are. You and others have I’m sure, volunteered your time, which is even more wonderful but on today’s internet everything does cost. May I ask what you are doing about paying for WordPress and site hosting? Not having any ads is fantastic, but they did pay for the site. I’d happily pay a small sum to keep the pot boiling and I’m sure others would too.

  45. A welcome move…

    I’m a long time lurker and (very) occasional poster, mostly because (as now) I get to solve/view posts very late in the day.

    The minor quibbles:

    – the size of the avatars (mentioned above)
    – the indentation of replies to previous comments. It’s much more difficult to see the hierarchy of responses in the new layout.
    – I don’t seem to get much ability to format my posts – a restriction until the site beds in?

    The big pluses:

    I’m a major user of addons to my browser (firefox) – I use noscript, adblock plus and privacy badger (some or all are available for other browsers).
    – for noscript I now only need to allow two sites: tftt and wp and block none. For the livejournal site I had to allow 4 sites and blocked 9 (mostly ad based I suspect as the site worked fine without any of these)
    – surprisingly adblock plus hasn’t changed much – it only blocked one site on livejournal as opposed to none on the new site.
    – for privacybadger I now only block cookies for wp sites as opposed to blocking 6 trackers and 3 other sites installing cookies on livejournal.

    Finally: I get the following error when my searches fail:

    Warning: Attempt to read property “post_content” on null in /home4/fkyyinmy/public_html/website_2c9c4962/wp-content/plugins/user-registration/includes/functions-ur-template.php on line 858

    Thanks,

    Mark

    1. Hi Mark. You’ve come across a bug in the User Registration plugin. I’ve managed to suppress the warning so it should no longer happen.
      As for your quibbles – the first 2 have already been noted. For the third you can do as you could in Livejournal – include HTML in your comments, e.g. Bold or Site Home Further enhancements to comment editing may be possible later, but I can’t promise anything.

  46. Love the new site. It looks so official. (Hopefully the search feature works better than the old site’s did!)

    Anyway, long time lurker here. Since I’m waiting for movers to come (yadda yadda yadda, just shoot me) I may as well just finally introduce myself.

    I’m either a very young Gen X-er or a very old Millennial from New England. I inherited a love of puzzles from my father (R.I.P.) Everyday you’d find him in the kitchen or on the porch with a puzzle of some sort. Bic in one hand, Lucky Strike in the other. One of my earliest memories is this: when he was in the hospital for something or other I used my own money to buy him a book of cryptograms. It was a crappy little thing but he pretended to like it.

    On to cryptics! I first discovered cryptic crossword puzzles in one of PennyPress’s variety issues. I could not crack the cryptic at the time and so I always just skipped them. (They really don’t give you much guidance there, but they’re actually pretty good and seem to be slightly more common these days.) Then, circa 2017 I read Crossword Mystery by Punshon, which features clues via crossword, and I was so baffled by it all I decided to have a proper go at it myself and so I ordered a couple compilation books to get started: a Quickie from the Times and one from the Daily Mail, I think.

    I really struggled. I tried, failed, and they lingered on my shelf for a few months. But I kept thinking about them. Probably of how good it would feel once I finally unlocked that special cryptic secret. I can’t describe that feeling. There’s a scene in Goonies where one of the kids uses his knowledge of Latin to clear an obstacle. That’s the kind of dragon I’m chasing. Dopamine, epiphanies, blah blah blah, knowledge is power.

    (Movers called at 830am to say they wouldn’t make the 9 o’clock appointment, they’d get here at 11. Now it’s past 1. They sound like a pair of dodos on the phone. Unless they’re lying. Which makes more sense than two adults being this bad at following GPS directions.)

    Thanks to you fine folks I finally did crack them, to make a long story short. You guys are brilliant. Now, five years later, I’m great at Quickies (ranging from 4:30 to 25m because sometimes some of the setters—Mara, for instance—punch me in the face) and I can complete many 15s, but I have a long way to go. The Mephisto is not in my sights at all. Oftentimes in the 15×15 there are some clues that, for me, are completely ungettable (flora, fauna, geography, Britishisms, etc) and would forever be ungettable. Not fun, but that doesn’t stop me. That’s when I turn to you guys!

    Us book solvers are never current with the board. We miss out on a lot of the back and forth (I especially love those uber-rare spicy comments.) I have signed up for the Times for a year or two but I prefer the book rather than my iPad. With pen and paper I can use the blank space underneath the grid as a scratch pad. One irksome thing about the books is when the clues are altered from the version in the paper or online—and not always for the better, in my opinion—so it sometimes is impossible to find out how to parse a particular clue.

    (The movers finally got here. Dodos, they are. But nice dodos. I’m a dodo myself anyway. Apropos of nothing, did you know 7 steps make a flight of stairs? I didn’t. But if it comes up in a cryptic I sure am ready for it!)

    I really get a kick out of all of your solve times. I once tried an experiment: even if I pre-solved a quickie, it would take me at least 4 minutes just to fill in the grid. So I am amazed at some of your speeds! I think the pen and paper slow me down. It’s really fun when newbies DNF or take too long to count their time. Because that was me! I have scrawled “DNF” across the top of many a puzzle.

    Thank you all: bloggers, commenters, and of course, setters. And whoever pays for this new site. Even though I don’t comment, even though I don’t know any of you from Adam, I do feel part of your tribe. I turn to the cryptic in times of stress and worry. I’ve brought them absolutely everywhere and they’ve helped me bide my time when biding my time and distracting my mind was very, very necessary.

    Thank you for all that and thank you for teaching me a skill that feels something not unlike magic.

    (I’ve written this in spurts. It’s almost 3pm, the movers are still here. But hopefully soon I’ll be on the road! I went to the dog park for a while, but I had to go back because I left a 15×15 book on a bench. I had to go back for it because I can’t wait to get to a hotel, have a shower, and crack a cryptic in a nice, cool bed. And not think all the anxious thoughts about moving. With my bulldog panting by my feet wondering what the hell is happening. Where is our stuff?! Where are our people?!)

  47. Thanks so much for the new site. Relieved to see the back of the Russian ads which i found rather unnerving!

  49. Many thanks to the whole team for sorting this out so quickly! I’m sure we all feel a lot safer now. I rarely comment as I often do puzzles later on – or even the following day(s) – but I like to check the parsing and see if my thoughts chime with the comments of others. Penny

  50. Thank you so much to all for your work in creating the new site. It’s better than ever. I can now see the glossary on my phone version which I couldn’t before.

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