Peter Meissner (@marvin_dpr) released crossword.r to CRAN today. It’s a spiffy package that makes it dead simple to generate crossword puzzles.

He also made a super spiffy javascript library to pair with it, which can turn crossword model output into an interactive puzzle.

I thought I’d combine those two creations with a way to highlight new/updated packages from the previous week, cool/useful packages in general, and some R functions that might come in handy. Think of it as a weekly way to get some R information while having a bit of fun!

This was a quick, rough creation and I’ll be changing the styles a bit for next Friday’s release, but Peter’s package is so easy to use that I have absolutely no excuse to not keep this a regular feature of the blog.

I’ll release a static, ggplot2 solution to each puzzle the following Monday(s). If you solve it before then, tweet a screen shot of your solution with the tag #rstats #puzzler and I’ll pick the first time-stamped one to highlight the following week.

I’ll also get a GitHub setup for suggestions/contributions to this effort + to hold the puzzle data.