How I Got My Puzzle to Post Itself Every Day

The Daily Problem

After I finished building my word puzzle game, I ran into a surprisingly simple problem:

I kept forgetting to post it.

Some mornings I was too busy.
Other times I remembered halfway through the day.
Once I forgot for two days in a row.

That’s when I realized:
I needed a system that could do it for me.

I didn’t want to wake up and post a new puzzle every day.
I wanted the puzzle to just… appear.

So I Gave My Website an Alarm Clock

That’s where the idea of a cron job comes in.

If you’ve never heard that word before, don’t worry — I hadn’t either.

A cron job is basically just an alarm clock for computers.
It says:

"At exactly this time, do this task."

I wanted the site to:

Wake up every morning at 5:00 AM
Make a new puzzle
Post it
Go back to sleep

So that’s what I built — with a lot of help from ChatGPT along the way, especially when it came to figuring out how all the moving parts needed to talk to each other.

What It Actually Does

Here's what happens every morning:

My website picks a random word (like "stone").
It creates a puzzle using that word.
It checks that the puzzle is fun — not too easy, not too hard.
Then it saves it and makes it visible on the site.

All by itself.

No reminders.
No manual steps.
Just automatic.

The Magic Behind It

I set up a tiny secret page on the site that can be visited to create a puzzle.

Then I told my hosting provider (Vercel) to visit that page every morning at 5:00 AM.

It’s like telling a friend:

“Hey, just go press that button every day for me.”

Except this friend never forgets, never oversleeps, and never complains.

(And in this case, the instructions for that friend were mostly written with ChatGPT's help.)

Why I Love It

I built this puzzle game because I love solving problems.

But building something that works on its own?
That was a whole new kind of satisfying.

It feels like I planted a tiny digital tree.
And now it grows a new leaf every day —
without me needing to water it.