David’s Revenge Solution

I was asked by Richard how long I spend each week on giving you The Stickler Weekly. The Stickler Weekly and associated website activities have 5 components:
1. Writing of The Stickler Weekly
2. Compilation of The Stickler Weekly solution files
3. Writing of the cryptic spiel that accompanies the solution
4. Writing the clue hints
5. Website maintenance and email/post responses
The Stickler Weekly takes me the best part of a day to set from scratch, with much more refinement necessary than for The Stickler in the Daily Telegraph. I consider The Stickler Weekly to be a level above the old Stickler as it can last a week for solvers, and the international aspect that I want to promote requires me to be more particular than for a normal Australian cryptic.
The Stickler Weekly solution files have two parts – the PDF that is created in Microsoft word originally and the HTML that is needed to display the same thing on the website. I’ve developed processes to streamline the production of these, so they only take me an hour or so to put together.
The cryptic spiel doesn’t take long once I’ve decided what I’m going to write about. That’s definitely the hard (and time-consuming) bit, as it obviously gets harder each week to come up with something. I’m always happy to answer questions that arise from website postings and issues that come out of the crosswords each week. I’d say on average I spend less than a hour writing the spiel once the topic has manifested itself.
The clue hints are an important part of The Stickler Weekly experience but can be time-consuming as each clue has to be individually assessed and a suitable clue hint generated if necessary. I’ve created some short-cuts to speed things up for transferring the hints that are created inside my crossword program to an HTML format that appears on the web, so all up it adds about 30 minutes to the whole process.
Owning a website can be a burden as there are always things to do. I get all kinds of queries via emails and through blog contacts, there are Stickler Boxed Set orders, thank yous to send off for contributions, updates to WordPress (the platform I use on the website) and dealings with spammers and malicious attacks.
All in all, I would spend a day to a day and a half bringing you The Stickler Weekly and associated bits and pieces.

There’s no online solution this week (too hard to do for the alphabetical jigsaw), so you’ll have to make do with the PDF.