2025.10.14

What's Changed

• Added support for the excellent Vulture 10x10 puzzle and the brand new Billboard puzzle, available with the vult and bill keywords respectively
• A bunch of improvements for AmuseLabs puzzles that should make downloading a little more robust, including fixing a new break that emerged today. A few changes that hopefully should make those kinds of interruptions rarer, and improve the story for adding new outlets
• Start to standardize a default User-Agent string for downloaders if unset in settings. It contains xword-dl and some version info

2025.10.3

Very small patch release to update how we find the latest puzzle from some outlets that use Amuse solvers (like the LA Times, Newsday, Daily Beast, Atlantic, The Walrus). A change to the page structure by Amuse could cause downloads from those outlets to fail, and now they're working again.

2025.9.28

A pretty eventful release, this version:

Adds

• New Yorker Mini (tnym), starting with a first-time contribution from @imjonathan!
• Observer Everyman and Speedy (ever, spdy), which were moved from the Guardian a few months back
• The Walrus (wal), a nice weekly puzzle out of Canada

Improves

• Switched backend for The New Yorker (both full-size and Mini) now that they're powered by Puzzmo, exciting
• Some embedded scraping behavior, including now catching AmuseLabs puzzles embedded with their Javascript approach
• Reliability on Daily Pop encoding (thanks to a smart PR from @afontenot) and Der Standard downloads

Removes

• The McKinsey puzzle downloader is no more. The puzzles are still online, but they're using anti-scraping tech that makes it too hard to grab from outside a browser.

2025.8.4

This release fixes AmuseLabs downloaders, many of which were broken after the same small change on their end. Kudos to @lcpdecastro for the relevant patch!

Also:

• updates the LA Times downloader and adds support for the LA Times Mini, available with the latm keyword.
• improves support for some embedded CrosswordCompiler/jpz solvers, which fixes at least a few pages in the wild.

As a note: this is the first release since v2025.7.27 shipped with an updated build system, metadata specification, project management tool, and release pipeline. If something seems broken for you, it may be related to that! Please open an issue!

Full Changelog: v2025.7.27...v2025.8.4

2025.7.27

Mostly a behind-the-scenes release, kicking the tires on a brand new build-and-release flow that incorporates the latest Python packaging technologies. From a user perspective, I expect there to be no visible changes at all.

For those curious: this now uses a spiffy pyproject.toml file (just five years after they were introduced!), upgrading from a long-in-the-tooth setup.py, uv as a project manager, upgrading from nothing at all, and hatchling as a build back-end, upgrading from setuptools and giving us some neat local version numbers, among other things.

For contributors, this should make writing and testing changes simpler and more consistent. It also reduces the overhead (for me) to publish new releases, which means they should be able to come out more often and reflect smaller updates. That's a big win!

2025.7.5.1

Small patch release here! I don't know if many users import xword_dl as a library, but yesterday's release accidentally changed the way it exposes its core functions. This patch release restores the ability to use xword_dl.by_keyword() and xword_dl.by_url() functions at the top level, and does nothing else.

2025.7.5

What's Changed

Big code quality release! The MVP here is @afontenot, who walked me through a pretty comprehensive review, adding type hinting and a bunch of other fixes that have improved the maintainability of the code base and reduced the risk of weird bugs. More on that to come. I've also run everything through ruff formatting and will be aiming to standardize and automate that in the near future.

• Fixed Puzzmo downloaders, Washington Post downloader, Der Standard downloader, LA Times downloader
• Dropped Support for Python 3.9. This one's a little more aggressive than usual because it's not quite EOL, but with the new typing stuff the union type pipe syntax helped a lot so we're rolling with it.

Full Changelog: v2025.5.8...v2025.7.5

2025.5.8

Another focused release while we await my promised Big Review release, but some good stuff in here.

• Fixed Washington Post downloader to accommodate some changes on their end
• Added support for Puzzmo Big, as well as general Puzzmo search-by-date. Puzzmo is one of my favorite outlets these days, with a great online solver and other games, and I encourage you to subscribe!. Also I have to give a combination shout-out/apology to @afontenot who suggested a great approach to search-by-date in #203 that I should have just merged then, but I waited too long, and it ended up getting scooped by some changes on Puzzmo's end that simplified things.
• Dropped support for Python 3.8, which has been EOL for 6 months or so. In this case it was to use the fancy native time zone support, but in general it's nice that the language keeps maturing and improving!

2025.4.2.1

Re-release of 2025.4.2 after a snag with the publishing workflow, published here for posterity

2025.4.2

Finally have some time to work on this project and so I'm cutting a new release with some maintenance updates before I get into the substantial review of PRs and issues. Thanks for your continued patience and support!

What's Changed

• Fixes to AmuseLabs solvers on some New Yorker pages, as well as LA Times, Vox, Daily Beast, and Newsday
• Fix to all the Guardian puzzles
• Removal of The Globe and Mail — they've switched to a syndicated cryptic
• some small bug fixes and dependency updates