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Ben Wilson

Ben Wilson

ben wilson This is the blog of a one Ben Wilson, a Louisville, Kentucky native who enjoys baseball, beer, music, bikes, things that fly and good food. By day he pushes pixels and makes the Internet happen for a local advertising agency. His wife, Kelly is an Ironman, and his baby Amelia is the cutest thing ever.

What is Kludge-O? — Well, Kludge-O is something on the order of theLocust v2. And I’ve been working on it (or what became kludge-o anyway) since something on the order of DECEMBER 2000. I thought I’d get it done end of February, as a boatload of it was completed in late Dec 2000 / Jan 2001.

So, “Where the hell is it?” you say. {more} Well, I try and try to sum up the motivation to finish developing the extra features I want on it (ie. User-defined Color Schemes, Personal Top Tens, News Queues, New Article Voting, Better Comment Handling), and out comes the sun and I go outside, or (as has lately been the case) I fall asleep.

What’s my motivation? Sometimes, I’m not real sure, and since work had been slow ’round March, April, I just felt drained… so drained that I didn’t want to work on the ‘kludge. May and June have been a little hectic, a little up and down at work, and I still feel drained. Argh! The last couple of posts on theLocust have given me a good deal of motivation, in that I think that if I post more like it, and allow OTHERS to submit their stories, that theLocust could prosper.

I intend this site, which is my “personal” site, if you will, to be much like Killoggs. I like their design a lot, but that really isn’t the gist of it all. It is (what appears to me to be) a group of friends, relating little bits of their lives to us, and most of it is entertaining, or at least thought-provoking. I like it. It’s smallish and the “signal to noise” ratio is rather high. Lots of good postings.

But, not being too technical of peoples, the Killoggs site isn’t too functional. It is, but not to Kludge-levels (oh dear!). So, that’s my idea for the site.

I’ll also have a few other installs of the ‘kludge goin on, too. Prolly one for my other domain, KYGeek.org, one for Kludge-O itself, and mebbe one for MPy3, if I ever get around to it.

filed under General and then tagged as
Jun 18 2001 ~ 3:17 pm ~ Comments (15) ~

15 Comments

  1. You know I’m all about the Kludge. Hopefully Nick, now that he’s into his apartment, will grab some internet access and we can pull him into this dark realm of ours. I keep trying to get J-Slo to kick it over here too. I’m performing all of my sidekick duties, man.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 5:21 am
  2. I hope she it doing well… and believe me… that oral appendix removal is not pretty.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 6:34 am
  3. What the hell is Hunter talking about? Perhaps I’m just slang inept, but for a write he’s pretty damn vague sometimes. I know who J-slo is, but what does “kicking it over here” mean. Where’s “here”? I’m thoroughly confused.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 6:45 am
  4. “here” as in “thelocust.org”. vagueness is in the eye of the confused!

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 8:14 am
  5. Ben is correct. Here means The Locust [dot] org. Also The List. Our little corner of CYBERSPACE. It’s CYBER-RIFFIC!

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 4:43 pm
  6. I think we should definately steal their idea of using nifty little icons to distinguish the individual people posting.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 4:46 pm
  7. and yes, ipso facto solemente, i am planning images for users, btw. that may be in a later version, but i do like his charicatures. they are nice.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 19, 2001 @ 7:17 pm
  8. So “I keep trying to get J-Slo to kick it over here” means you want Jessica to get a locust account. Geez. Ya could’ve just said that.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 20, 2001 @ 2:36 pm
  9. So “I keep trying to get J-Slo to kick it over here” means you want Jessica to get a locust account. Geez. Ya could’ve just said that.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 20, 2001 @ 2:36 pm
  10. oops. I guess i need to introduce some sort of method to keep that from happening. Also, i need to introduce some sort of method by which Eve can infer simple meanings from American-English slang. Yes. That will definitely go into Kludge-O (hehe).

    Comment by Anonymous — June 20, 2001 @ 3:01 pm
  11. And what is this “geez”? I do not understand…

    Comment by Anonymous — June 20, 2001 @ 7:01 pm
  12. Not technical? Ouch. You pain me.

    So, where does Killoggs need improvement, in your eyes. I have a long list of things, but I’d be interested in hearing what other people think.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 22, 2001 @ 8:46 am
  13. i didn’t mean that as a slight. it never occurred to me that killogg’s was all that complex on the back-end, and the content of killoggs never tipped me off to that point either. And i don’t think that Killoggs necessarily needs that level of complexity. I wouldn’t want to change it at all, personally! (i’m just smitten with the creative design, and the quality, quantity and diversity of the postings)

    But considering that my intention for Kludge-O is to be released to a wide audience, to be openly hackable (the HTML clearly defined outside of the code, the ability to use more than one database vendor, etc), kludge-o needs that extra functionality, like the rating of posts for moderation purposes, the story queue, the ability to “vote” stories into publishing.

    Killogg’s doesn’t need all that, and chances are, theLocust.org won’t need it either. I’m just trying to make kludge-o as flexible as possible. in my perfect world, it would fit killoggs just as well as Slashdot or kuro5hin.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 22, 2001 @ 10:54 am
  14. No offense taken :)

    Yeah, its not anywhere as complex on the backend as something like (ugh) slash. Or even, (ugh ugh) phpNuke. There is a lot going on though, all the content is democratically dynamic. For example, the page titles, interesting links and quotes are member submitted from the member screen, and all members can vote on them. If their score drops to low, the item won’t appear… There are so many little things like that I want to add.

    But, yeah. Killoggs is a community, it will never be something like Kludge-O, a package. I’d love to check out Kludge-O, when you get it finished. Sounds like an much better alternative to the above examples, which are not very good, in my opinion. Which is why I wrote my own code for Killoggs in the first place.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 22, 2001 @ 2:34 pm
  15. kludge-o is nearing a release, soon. every time i get close to it, though, there is something else that i want to add. in any case, you’ll be one of the first to know.

    regarding the voting and such, i’ve gone and made that optional. there are good things about slash, good things about kuro5hin (plenty of goodness there, IMHO), and plenty of good things about killoggs. I’m trying to package as much stuff into kludge-o (hence the name, i guess) as i can, and make it as configurable as possible.

    theLocust started out in much the same way that Killoggs did. I didn’t want what the others did, so i wrote my own. After slap-dashing it together, i decided i could do this in a sensible manner, and develop it properly. and hence, we have kludge-o.

    Comment by Anonymous — June 22, 2001 @ 10:21 pm

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