Popular cat macro website gets new tools

by Lisa Hoover Jun 12th 2007

You know there's really only three destinations on the Web anymore, right? Twitter (for your need-to-know fix), Joost (for your tv fix), and I Can Has Cheezburger? (for your laugh-til-you-drop fix). They're practically all anyone talks about and if there's anything else going on around the Internet these days, you'd be hard pressed to know it.

Fans of the insanely popular lolcats meme site I Can Has Cheezburger? (ICHC) have spent the last six months or so laughing their heads off at adorable cat pictures with funny captions. To get in on the action, visitors to the site can email their own captioned cat picture and wait to see if it gets selected for posting, or simply offer their own caption in the comment section of existing pictures.

ICHC junkies rejoice. Now there's a third option and Download Squad talked to one of the enigmatic site owners, known only to visitors as "cheezburger," to get the inside scoop.

ICHC has debuted "The Cheezburger Factory," a do-it-yourself picture builder, as part of the site's new functionality. TCF, as it was quickly dubbed, lets users choose from a huge assortment of cat pictures or upload their own, and also provides the tools to caption them. Pictures are then submitted simultaneously to the image hosting service Photobucket, and to a new section of ICHC designated especially for TCF-created pictures.

If this sounds a little familiar, it should. A similar tool was written and developed by Gordon of LolCat Buildr fame a couple of months ago but this one integrates directly into the ICHC website and offers additional funtionality. "Gordon's done a great job with LolCat Buildr," says cheezburger. "Unfortunately because his site runs on his company's server, they own the code, and he can't license us any rights to the source code." Cheezburger says Gordon hammered out the code for the new captioning tool in a mere three days.

Another cool feature that rolled out today offers members of Wordpress (the blogging platform on which ICHC is hosted) the chance to vote on user-submitted pictures and drive them to the main site. "The highest voted submissions will be reviewed multiple times a day," says cheezeburger, "and once they reach a particular threshold or momentum will be promoted to the front page."

Despite ICHC's meteoric success, cheezburger and his partner tofuburger still have day jobs to maintain so these new tools may help the site function a bit more independently of its owners. "We really want to help foster ICHC into a self-sustaining community of cat and pet lovers," says cheezeburger, "and we hope this can help people to enjoy the site even more."

Though the stampede of people anxious to use the new tools contributed to a temporary site slowdown and general wonkiness on Monday, everything seems to be running smoothly now. We tried out the TCF tool, uploader, and member's voting option and can safely pronounce them easy to use, "full of win," and "awsum."

Tags: cheezburger, lolcats

Reader Comments (Page 1 of 1)

Jarrett Kaufman said 11:55AM on 6-13-2007

I can't, for the life of me, figure out why these damn photos are so funny. What is so funny about terrible grammar, spelling, punctuation, lack of capitalization, all superimposed over weird photos of cats?

And yet, despite my confusion, I manage to laugh out loud at quite a few of them.

Are they tapping into some primitive humor base buried deep within the recesses of my brain? What is this juvenile humor that actually gets a response out of me?

I should be better than this...

iamhoff said 12:50PM on 6-13-2007

Jarrett,

There is no explanation. My little sister exposed me to the disease of lolcats, and the only cure I've found is more cowbell (sorry, couldn't resist). I'm at a loss as to why they're so damn funny, they just are. But I've got this great pic of my dog, now all I need to do is come up with a cute caption that is full of win and awsum...

Ryan Carter said 3:02PM on 6-13-2007

Sorry, but the feline species on this planet are my arch-nemesis, and so thusly I despise them and cannot condone looking at cats...things that make me go boooooahhhh! Kill me now, please...

(good post BTW)

Lisa Hoover said 3:39PM on 6-13-2007

Despite being a lolcat junkie of the highest order, I haven't got a clue why resonate like they do. Here's one theory I've read which makes about as much sense as anything else:

http://whatladder.wordpress.com/2007/05/10/we-are-all-luvz-cat-macros/

It's just freaky what a cult it has become: lolcats have their own Wikipedia page, a language primer written by an lolcat fan, and sub-groups everywhere including Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. Personally, I think the lolcats are planning world domination. Oddlee, I iz OK wif dat.

James said 4:48PM on 6-13-2007

I'm particularly curious about the walrus/bucket meme. I think it started at ICHC as well, but I first heard of when James Lileks used the bucket (and having/not having one) as a metaphor for his not knowing whether he'd keep his job or not. I didn't find the associated pictures (OH NOES MY BUCKIT, etc) nearly as funny as some of the cat ones. I'm just nerdy enough that "" hit me square on the funny bone...

James said 4:49PM on 6-13-2007

Grr, I was afraid of that. Substituting square for angle brackets, that was supposed to be "[lolcat align='right']", the picture with a half dozen kittens squashed into the corner of a box.

Lisa Hoover said 4:58PM on 6-13-2007

James,

I think you're right about lolrus forking from ICHC but I'm not sure. Readers, do you know? According to this hilarious post by David McRaney, it looks that way:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/05/08/a-special-in-depth-analysis-by-david-mcraney-l337-katz0rz/

Here's the pic you're referring to with the aligned kittehs:

http://icanhascheezburger.com/2007/06/12/lolcat-alignright/

Zach Beane said 5:57AM on 6-14-2007

I think http://wigflip.com/roflbot/ has a bit nicer interface than TCF or the Buildr. The font rendering on TCF, in particular, is kinda funky.

MoonHippie said 11:07AM on 6-14-2007

The bad grammar and misspellings... if your cat was talking and typing that is what you might get. You have to read the captions with a kitteh accent. Maybe you have to be a cat person to get it. Maybe some pronunciation audio clips would help people get that part of it. Then you would know how to say 'kitteh'... me lubs my kitteh.

Lisa Hoover said 11:19AM on 6-14-2007

Zach, yeah, it is a bit funky. The Factory is offline for maintenance at the moment so maybe that's one of the things they're working on?

MoonHippie, ever catch yourself typing like that during online chats or in emails to friends? That's when you know you have lolcatfever. At least I've, uh, heard that happens to some people. Of course, I have no firsthand knowledge...

locatrguy said 2:48PM on 6-14-2007

hai, if you're a lolcat junkie, there's a community site at http://lolcatr.com, we has a super-cool image generator too.

http://lolcatr.com

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