Wordle

From IndieWeb


Wordle is a word game made by Josh Wardle, purchased by the New York Times in 2022. Some IndieWeb community members post their game results to their personal sites.

Game & sharing summary: players get six tries to guess a word. When the game is over, a player has the option to copy a grid of tiles that shows how the game progressed, enabling the player to share her/his game on social media, text, or email, without spoiling it for others.

Sharing game results on silos like Twitter helped popularize the game. The share feature copies a block of text, which means you can also post your game results on your own site.

Why

Why post your Wordle

Why post Wordle results to your own site:

If you want to save your game statistics on the New York Times website, you have to create an account, or at least enable cookies and allow their website to store them indefinitely, both of which raise privacy concerns.

Additionally, while The New York Times has not placed a pay wall in front of the game, that could change. For that matter, the paper could shut down the game altogether, deleting your data.

By posting game results to your own site, you can create your own Wordle archive, guaranteeing access to your data.

How

How to post your Wordle

Wordle provides a simple sharing mechanism. After completing a game, there's a pop over screen that shows your stats, with a "share" button. Pressing that button copies your results as plain text. You can then paste that text into a post to manually PESOS it to your site, and POSSE it to silos if you wish.

You can also calculate statistics on your Wordle games (win percentage, winning streaks, etc.).

IndieWeb Examples

Brian Tremblay

Brian Tremblay saves copies of his Wordle game results as an h-feed since 2024-01-22:

He also calculates the same statistics that New York Times generates and posts them at the top of that page.

History

Acquisition

In January 2022, The New York Times company bought the game from Wardle and moved it to the New York Times website shortly afterwards. Since the NYT has a paywall, which could at some point be used to block access to Wordle historical game play information, there is additional motivation to post results on personal sites.

See Also