I’ve just heard that Words With Friends is now available on Facebook. I’ve played it on my iPhone before, but I’m now going to check out the new version. It’s at http://apps.facebook.com/wordswithfriends/
Remember, Scrabble Helper works beautifully with Words With Friends, just select the ‘Words With Friends’ option under ‘Choose your dictionary’.
Hi guys,
I’ve got some news I’m really excited about!
For the last 4 months I’ve been working with Todd Kreisman – author, stand-up comedian, and most importantly brilliant Scrabble player to create an amazing book on Scrabble Strategy.
Todd took an incredible journey for us, playing ten games of Scrabble with players of increasing ability, until he was playing the very best players on the internet.
And he wrote down every single move he made, every word he played, and exactly what he was thinking when he made that move, and why he did it.
It’s like being inside his head as he plays!
And he complements all this with the very best advice on Scrabble strategy out there.
I hope you’ll be as excited as me when you see the book. Head over to the ebook page for more details.
And I’ve got a special offer for all my blog readers to celebrate the Summer holidays: just enter SUMMERHOLIDAY in the coupon box when you checkout to get 10% off! But be quick, the voucher is only valid until 7th August!
I’ve just added a few pages to the site for people wanting to improve their Scrabble, Lexulous or Words With Friends knowledge.
These are a set of Scrabble Word Lists that are useful for revising/preparing for a game. Such things as all the 2 letter words, all the words that use Q without a U, all the words that use more than one of the ‘high score’ letters, that sort of thing.
Either click the Word Lists tab above, or follow this link: Scrabble Word Lists.
Are there any other lists you’d like to see? Let me know!
Scrabble Helper user Mark recently suggested an improvement to allow him to use Scrabble Helper on his iPad.
The problem is that Apple products ‘auto correct’ whatever you type in (which can have annoying yet hilarious consequences – as seen on the excellent website damnyouautocorrect.com).
Obviously that’s not so good when you’re trying to enter a random assortment of letters from your Scrabble rack as it tries to make sense of it and ‘correct’ your mistyping.
After a bit of research I’ve found out how to get Scrabble Helper to tell iPads, iPhones and iPods not to auto correct the letters as you input them.
So hopefully Mark can can back to enjoying Scrabble Helper from the comfort of his iPad 🙂
Well, it only feels like yesterday when I bought a new web server to cope with all the new Scrabble Helper users.
In fact it was 3 months ago, and yet we’re still getting new users every day. I guess you’re all telling your friends! But it does mean the site grinds to a halt during the most popular hours.
So to fix this I’ve bought an even bigger server. It’s got 4 times as much memory and at least 4 times as much processing power. The change should make everything go much smoother and cope with everyone who joins – well, at least for another few months 😉
I’m dedicated to making sure everyone who wants to use Scrabble Helper can do so, and so as fast as you can recruit new users I’ll throw more hardware at the site to make everyone happy!
The change is happening tomorrow (Fri 13 May – I’m glad I’m not superstitious!) and will take about 2 hours. So the site will be unavailable while that happens.
We start the move at 1pm UK time (that’s 12 noon UTC, 5am Pacific Daylight Time, 8am Eastern Daylight Time).
See you on the new server 🙂
I had to take Scrabble Helper down for maintenance earlier today to do an upgrade to the server. It was only supposed to be offline for about 5 minutes, but you know the way computers are, and unforeseen problems turned 5 minutes into more like half an hour. Sorry about that.
But to balance that with some good news, following a request from user Kristen, I’ve put a new setting in the ‘Options’ screen. This allows you to choose whether or not the displayed words are clickable to get a definition.
If you haven’t found it yet, you can get to the Options screen by clicking on the tab at the bottom right of the main window. It has a few settings to customise the results to the way you like them.
This morning I got my hosting company to move Scrabble Helper to a new webserver.
The new server has twice as much memory, so should be able to handle twice as many simultaneous visitors before grinding to a halt 🙂
Everything seems to be working ok, but I’ll be monitoring it over the next week to check there are no problems.
If you do find the site is still slow, or has any issues, please let me know. My hosting company has even bigger servers that I could upgrade to if we find this one isn’t up to the job.
We’ve had a lot of new users join Scrabble Helper since the Christmas holidays (welcome everyone!)
However this has made the site a little slow during peak periods.
To try to fix this I’ve just bought a new webserver from my hosting company, that will hopefully be twice as fast as the old one.
This means Scrabble Helper will be unavailable for a short period while we move over to the new server tomorrow (Friday 4 February). It should take less than 30 minutes to do the move, and I’ve scheduled it for the time when fewest people use the site, namely between 9am and 11am GMT (that’s 4am-6am EST, 1am-3am PST).
You don’t need to update your bookmarks or anything, just visit the site as usual and we’ll be back just the same, but hopefully faster.
I hope everything will be working smoothly after the move, but I’ll be on hand to fix any problems as they arise.
After the recent updates to Scrabble Helper I had some feedback that a few of you preferred the old way of displaying the words.
To try to keep everyone happy I’ve added a new ‘Options’ tab (on the right below the main window) where you can set your preferences.
This allows you to customise the order of the words in the list and how many are displayed as a summary before you click ‘show more’ to see the rest. You can even set it to show all words immediately if you prefer.
This saves the options on your computer (in a cookie), so if you access Scrabble Helper from more than one computer you’ll have to change them on each computer.
Hope this meets with your approval!
I recently asked all the members on the mailing list what they thought of the website, and how it could be improved.
(For those of you not on the mailing list it’s not too late to tell me what you think by taking the survey. You can also join the mailing list if you like.)
I’ve taken on board all the comments, and I’ve just made a whole load of improvements.
These are the changes I’ve just made:
I’ve still got loads of other changes I’d like to make, but they’re a lot harder, so may take a little longer!
I hope you like the improvements 🙂