Krysstips.se
http://krysstips.se11th of February 2009
Krysstips.se is my latest hobby project that I'm launching. It's a Django app that has a huge database of Swedish names and words in various forms. With this tool, when you get stuck doing a crossword you can get hints. E.g. "a 5 letter word that starts with p and second to last letter 'e'"
I'm now looking for an English database that I'm allowed to load and I'll write an English equivalent of the site. Any help appreciated! In fact, if you have any other language you'd like to add I'm more than happy to join forces.
This site started as a funny side project just to see if it was possible. I crunched the database file of words into a PostgreSQL database in a couple of hours and I wrote the actual search algorithm in another couple of hours. After that, spread over many late evenings and procrastinating tea breaks, I've spent, in total, about 5 man days doing all the other fluff which was: "stealing" a CSS, making it internationalized, translating the code and templates to Swedish, AJAXifying the search, adding the statistics and deploying it.
I'm not expecting high load or to make money on it but it's been done and I'm quite proud of it so I might as well announce it to the world.