It’s like something out of Poe, a dry clacking sound that freezes the blood, the very characteristic sound of a hard drive that has just up and died. Much follows: a computer that won’t restart until the deceased disc has been swapped out, a long menu of re-installations from the operating system on up, a web-site and blog that for a few days must go hang while we — skipping from Poe to Macbeth — must sleep no more.

And how was your week?

If you’ve been wondering what happened to the Daily Knowledge quiz questions for the past few days, or why there hasn’t been a new quiz this week, there’s the answer. But things are back pretty much to normal, life is once more on an even footing, and we’re considering yet again whether it might not be a good idea to have a fully synchronized back-up of our main working computer. Certainly the last few days would have been easier, but on the other hand there’s nothing like the celerity of a newly-installed system whose registry hasn’t been clogged up with years of unremitting use.

Ten new puzzles have been added to our Mini-Crypto-Hangman puzzle (see right-hand column), bringing the current total to 33.  Remember that the clues in this game are cryptic, not direct — they are more like riddles than synonyms.

We’ve just added our own diminutive take on the classic Hangman word puzzle to some pages of our site, including our blog pages. It’s the smallest Hangman we know, sized to fit in the right hand column of our standard layout. In view of the size, you don’t get the standard Hangman graphic; instead, we allow you seven wrong guesses, and on the eighth you lose. A cryptic clue is given for each mystery word. For starters there are just twenty-three words in our Hangman’s database, but more will gradually be added.

With any new feature that depends on Javascript and DHTML there’s the risk — nay, certainty — that it will not work in some browsers. So far it’s only been tested in our workaday browsers, Firefox 1.5 and Internet Explorer 6. Please let us know if you find a bug and we’ll do our best to squash it.

To get new puzzles without reloading the entire page, just click in the title (“Mini-Crypto Hangman”). After a brief pause to refresh, Hangman will, um, resume executing.

We make no claims for the beauty of our blog, aiming no higher than sturdy simplicity and consistency with our overall site design, but as such the last bricks are now in place. No doubt certain browsers will have issues, and any reports to that effect will be duly appreciated. Meanwhile, no more on design, and back to constructing next week’s quiz on St. Patrick and Ireland.

Once a department of FamilyGames.com, Trivia Park finally moved away from home late in 2005. Until now, however, news for both sites was announced through the highly sporadic FamilyGames.com email newsletter. It may be that some types of brief announcement regarding Trivia Park will continue to made that way, but this blog will henceforth be taking over most of the work.

The main reason for the change is that Trivia Park generates news much more frequently than FamilyGames.com, and updating a blog is much easier and cheaper than sending out frequent newsletters. Another big plus is the blog software’s support for RSS feeds, meaning that for those who desire it, features like our Daily Knowledge question can come to you automatically through your feed reader, without your having to visit our site. For those who don’t know about RSS, here’s a quick guide to get you started.

Integrating the blog into the existing site design is a work in progress. It may be a while before everything looks perfect, but eventually we expect to solve all the puzzles and make everything ship-shape.

Enough for now. Welcome to the Trivia Park News.