Play most New York Times crosswords from 1976 to 2017 in the browser!
For years I've wanted a simple, ad-free interface to play crosswords online. The New York Times has a stellar collection of crosswords spanning several years, however it is locked behind a paywall and littered with ads.
Fortunately for me, I stumbled upon two projects that were critical to developing this project:
- a repo of scraped crosswords from the NYT, available as a crude JSON API.
react-crossword, a crossword component for React apps that is available as an npm package.
Using doshea's repo, I converted the scraped JSON data into a format compatible with react-crossword using a Python script. This data is available as another crude API, hosted in a GitHub repo.
Then it was just a matter of integrating a date picker into the React app, allowing users to select a crossword.
With this interface, users can select a crossword date (between 1/1/1976 and 12/1/2017, with some gaps in coverage), and enter answers to each across/down question. Whenever a question is answered correctly, it is crossed out and a green check appears next to the question. Users can also choose to reveal all answers, or reset the board.
The following instructions are for curious developers who want to fork the code and build something of their own.
Install dependancies with:
yarn install
Build locally with:
yarn run predeploy
Or build for production and move all built code to /docs with:
yarn run build
You can run the React app locally wih the following:
yarn run start
Deploy to GitHub Pages with:
yarn run deploy
- Sean Reid