Fun, inspiring, educational word puzzles
I saw some fun word puzzles in a puzzle magazine and had the inspiration that they would be really fun to play in an interactive format. In each case the solution to the puzzle is a famous quotation. (Well, maybe not all that famous, but quotations by famous people). So I called the site quotepuzzles.com. It was my first attempt at a writing full javascript games. Once the game play was working I had to figure out where to get some quotations. There are many places on the web dedicated to collections of quotations, so I just did a bit of web scraping a assembled a big database of quotations. Then I could provide a different puzzle every day. As a byproduct, I realized I could assemble my own puzzle books by using the same puzzle creation code and sending it to PDF output. So not only does the site offer online interactive puzzles, there are puzzle books available for purchase. I didn't expect many people would buy a PDF of puzzles that would then have to be printed on paper in order to solve them. That expectation was accurate. I've averaged about one book sale a month. I keep the site running because every once in a while someone sends me fan mail gushing about how they love playing a new puzzle every day.