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Study Crosswords

study crossword

Something that I’ve always found difficult is staying focused while learning a new framework or technology.  I start off strong by taking a Udemy course or watching some things on YouTube and then after about a week of intense learning begin to lose interest.  Some of this is due to being overwhelmed (there is just so much out there to learn) and some is because it gets old doing the same thing over and over again.  

While I do learn by reading and watching tutorials, I’m also always looking for different ways to learn that can speed up the process and keep it from getting stale.  One of these that I’ve found works great is crosswords.

If you Google online crossword builder you get a shortlist of sites offering this.  They all work pretty much the same way, you copy in your terms along with their definitions and hit generate.  Your crossword is then built and you can either fill it in online or print it out.  

After looking at a few of these, my favorite so far is Crossword Labs (https://crosswordlabs.com).  The site is easy to understand and has you up in no time.  

Here is how easy it is to set up your own study crosswords.  Mine are programming related because that’s what I’m focused on learning right now but you can build yours on any topic you like.

  • Go to Google and type HTML Tags into the search box
  • Click on the HTML Element Reference link for w3schools.com (That site is great because it puts things like code tags etc in tables)
  • Highlight and click on all the tags and their definitions in the table and hit copy
  • Paste that list into OpenOffice. You can really use any editor of your choice
  • Highlight everything and select Edit —> Find & Replace
  • Search for the < sign and hit Replace All
  • Do the same for the > sign
  • Copy / paste the list into the crossword generator in the appropriate box
  • If the Preview window at the bottom of the page says it can’t generate, click the Why word in Find out what you need to fix
  • You are given a list of words / letters that it can’t add to the crossword.  In my case, single letter tags like a or b can’t be included.  I simply went through the list and added the < > tags back to those so a becomes <a> again.  That fixed it
  • Create a passcode so you can edit later if you want and hit Generate

You can find and use my actual HTML Tag crossword here.  https://crosswordlabs.com/view/html-tags-7

Copy the URL and you can come back anytime or embed in your own site to study or refresh yourself on the terms.  That’s it.