Popular cat macro website gets new tools

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