crosshare VS Phil

https://crosshare.org/ is worth a look. Lets you build a grid and then 'autofills' suggested words around the words you enter. (And then you can overwrite the suggestions, and it gives more).

Adam Aaronson and Ross Tredeau are great. Sometimes I'll scroll around https://crosshare.org and do some midis. There are some other suggestions in this comment section from other users.

All in all, things are slowly improving. The Times revamped their submission process, and though some outlets are steadfast in appealing to an older crowd, plenty of independent and smaller publishers are doing really good work to improve diversity. USA Today (which had the plagiarism scandal) got a new editor, Erik Agard, who publishes majority women, and Universal and the New Yorker both also have noticeably more diversity in construction than other outlets. Other people choose independent outlets to publish on just for fun, which democratizes the hobby in general.

I created this issue if you'd like to track progress or give feedback: https://github.com/mdirolf/crosshare/issues/308

There is now an "open on crosshare.org" link on the bottom of the begin/pause screen for embeds - right next to the "powered by crosshare.org" link :)

The way it works for embeds is that the embedder gets to choose their own color theme. One fear I had when I added that was that it could mess w/ readability depending on what they chose, but I figured it was up to the embedder to get it right. But I like the idea of letting the solver choose to override it. Or maybe it'd be sufficient to just add an "open on crosshare.org" button to the embed that takes you to the puzzle's page on crosshare which will then use your chosen color theme?

Crosshare

Perhaps many of you know about the great free web crossword maker Phil. When I came across it last year, I loved it and tinkered with adding some more features to it. I never shared it at the time, but I thought that the new features might be useful enough that some might like to know about it, so here's a post now. Plus, I'm thinking about adding some more to it, and I'd be curious to hear what anyone's desires for potential additional features might be.