Last week we made updates to both Trendy and Cody. My post today is a quick overview of some of the new features.

Cody

In six short months since launch, you – our community members – have been so passionate about Cody, solving puzzles and creating more to challenge each other. My coworker Lindsay talked about this in her celebration post about Cody’s latest milestones.

Behind the scenes, one of the things that happens when a site develops so much content rapidly, is that it gets harder to find things that you want to find. For example, maybe you want to find more puzzles created by your favorite puzzler. Now you have ways to find this information quickly using search directives. You can find problems, solutions, and players by using search directives in the search box or adding them to the URL. Find out more about Cody directives in the About Cody page.

Below are my favorite tips to help refine your search Cody searches.

Target your Problem Search:

• to problems in a specific group, or
• to problems with a specific tag, or
• to problems created by a specific person.

Target your Solution Search:

• to solutions created by a specific player by name, or
• to solutions of a specific size.

Target your Players Search

• to players by name, or
• to players from a specific company or organization.

Trendy

There’s some big news for Trendy in this release too! It is now simpler to create new trends and plots.

When you click on the button, you now see a new page where you can completely define your new trend in two easy steps:

1. Write code for your trend
2. Tell us about your trend (title and description) and set up notifications

When you save your changes, Trendy will automatically go out and collect your first data point. It will return to the website noted in your script and continue to collect data daily unless you disable the trend.

When you look at a trend, you can easily create plots by clicking on the button. Plots are now a single page with just two steps:

1. Write code for your plot
2. Tell us about your plot (title and description)

You can edit the default setting for your plot if you wish, or you can just hit save to create your plot.

It’s pretty easy, so jump on in and start trending with Trendy!