Wordle Illustrated

Wordle, Illustrated is a little website I built to show off a collection of daily Wordle puzzles, solved by me and illustrated by Midjourney, using each of my guesses as a prompt.

Why? #

As an artist, engaging with tools like Midjourney or DALL-E is a way for me enjoy the interactive act of creativity, even when my hands aren’t in the mood to grip a pencil or paintbrush. Additionally, I was doing the Wordle puzzle most days, so including the ritual of sending my guesses to Midjourney as a prompt just added a bit more fun to it. And why not share them?

I’ve lost interest in the project for now, but you can still see the results of the puzzles I solved.

Building it #

I used the same Hugo theme, Congo, to build Wordle, Illustrated as I used for this portfolio.

There’s a lot to love about tools like Hugo (a framework based on Go). Static site generators on offer today remind me of the old internet (I’m thinking HTML or some php files on an Apache server), but tuned up like a sports car. You can either build it locally and ssh the build/public folder onto a server, web host, or S3 bucket, or go the modern route where a simple push to main triggers your build pipeline and it’s live in a minute or two.

This website is hosted on Netlify. It took me no time at all to get it up and running, thanks to all of the time and effort other folks have poured into building tools like this.

I made a few tweaks to the original theme to get it to do what I wanted:

• Added a small component to pass in my guesses to display them like a Wordle grid.
• Added a simple toggle to hide or show the guesses on the main page (in the off chance that someone didn’t want today’s solution spoiled to them).
• Updated the layout on the homepage to display the “articles” (each wordle) in a grid.

Screenshots #