Slashdot Mirror
Vote in 5K Contest
antidigerati writes: "The annual 5k website contest is closed and in the voting stage! Some impressive entries this year. Take a look and vote for your favourites!" Slashdot will take first place in its little-known cousin, the 500K contest.
...on an IBM 1620 decimal machine (made in late 1950s), I had 120 digits of instructions on a single 80 column card (which could be run as a boot loader card directly from the card reader). Overlapping instructions, donchaknow. Printed out THIMK over and over on the system console, one sense switch changed the speed, another halted it. The M in THIMK was the halt instruction, which is why it wasn't THINK. Think was of course the IBM (pseudo?) motto of the times.
--
Infuriate left and right
As a participant of last year's 5K contest, I just want to say thanks to Stewart for making this more than just a one-shot wonder. By the entries I've seen so far, the first 5K served as the thrown-down gauntlet, and it's great to see so many people take up the challenge, and doing such an admirable job.
It's also wonderful to see the5k.org doing so well. The whole site was made quite a while after the 5k contest ended, and a lot of people would have been loath to put in the effort.
Thanks Stewart!!!
Kevin Fox
--
Kevin Fox
http://www.google.com/search?q=perl+golf
According to netcraft they're running IIS or Win2K with ASP. Betcha they're running SQL Server too.
They have a nice lean design; it really ought to fly. How much to you want to bet everything including the front page is dynamically generated for each and every request?
Maybe there ought to be a web design contest for minimizing server end loads with dynamic content.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Judging by votes and sheer coolness, the 5k Chess is the big winner. Hell, it beat me. If something under 5k can beat me at chess... well, my TI-85 has 32kb, maybe I should let it think for me on a more frequent basis.
The big loser? Skadden Arps Recruiting site. Arriving at the entry itself is sort of like buying a car in the classified ads and then finding out that it's a tiny plastic model of a car. The joke is barely funny until you realize someone submitted that entry for real, and that the entry was posted on the list anyway.
Timepiece is pretty funky, I have to say.
By the way, I have made websites under 5k before, and I've found them highly entertaining. They consist mostly of ranting text about my high school from about 5 years ago. Oh well, maybe my tastes are unique to the world...
a.> they use active server pages
b.> their own images are 5k plus
c.> their pages are bland and slow
Currently as the site is slashdotted i'm getting an amazing 17 bytes/second from them. So these 5k sites will still take minutes to download :D
now THAT's web karma for you.
fross
http://entries.the5k.org/352/index.htm
By far the niftiest entry of the bunch.
Nice smirky attitiude! My name is Eric and I built the site.
/. traffic.
/was/ created dynamically so as to show up to the second stats for the entries, but it was a matter of changing few lines of code to have it used the cached XML.)
>Betcha they're running SQL Server too.
We are indeed running SQL2k. The server is doing fine, btw, though we seem to have maxed out the pipe with the recent
>How much to you want to bet everything including
>the front page is dynamically generated for each
>and every request?
I will take your bet! I am using an XML caching system I built so that calls to the DB are minimized, which means that the front page is not dynamically created every time (unless you count an XSL transformation). Each entry description page, and even the list of all entries are pulled from cached XML now (the list
Anyway, thanks for your interest in the contest.
You really ought to look a little harder.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
I've seen this several time, and it's quite frustrating: people write their website with themselves in mind, assume that everyone who visits it will have a certain knowledge base to make sense of it, and never think of those who don't.
The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.
--Henry Kissinger
There's also the 7 kB web competition in Germany, and the winners have been announced.
rb
________
Does anyone actually have a Java program designed to control air traffic, or for the operation of a nuclear facility?
I only saw one entry that was pure html...the sad sad story of the armadillo. I didn't get the joke, but I do want to know what that guy is doing in bed with an armadillo.
Hopefully I didn't put any [] around my words.
I just love the "ask your site" entry....
/. - Thats causes bubba.. they ain't there!
I put in www.slashdot.org with the title "news for nerds" and It came up with forrest gump
I can only imagine slashdot playing forrest and kiro5shin playing bubba whenever slashdot posts a link...
kiro5 - I can't feel my webpages...
*chuckle*
(define the-question (or (* 2 b) (not (* 2 b))))
Perhaps the geek community would understand this contest better if it's explained as an optimization contest. You're given a 5120-byte limit on your entire Web site. Produce the best thing you can, with the best functionality and the best design, under that constraint.
My own entry ("Puzzle Cube") was a fantastic exercise in JavaScript optimization to this end. Make the code as functional as I can. Okay, now remove the whitespace and linebreaks. Retitle the variables and functions with single-letter names. Remove unnecessary braces. Replace array declarations with .split() methods to save a few more characters. Trim the fat. Make it lean. And oh, make it still work for 95% of the browsers.
Of course it's a gimmick -- but more accurately, it's a challenge. Or a proof-of-concept. Whichever you prefer.
I'm reading a lot of people saying that 5k is not enough or 5k is not realistic....! Sure understandably, hey it's a challenge, not a walk in the park. You actually have to work at creating a page that's either entertaining, useful, and under 5k.
My next comment is, "Have you actully gone to the site and seen the 5k submissions?" Some are unbelievable! You've got to check out the flash dolphin submission near the bottom of the page. Or the chess game, or the useful yearly calander!
With out people trying to make java and/or scripts as small as possible we would have nothing left but bloated / slow web pages.
Give these guys a break, they worked their butts off and deserve tons of credit.
Linuxrunner
www.slightlycrewed.com - Because aren't we all?
As many posters already pointed out the the5k.org itself is extremely bloated. You have to jump through so many hoops just to look at a couple pages... Wouldn't it be nice if the 5k principle is applied more often in real life.
Size does matter, even if you have a fast connection (at the server AND the client side). Don't use FONT tags, don't specific "Arial, Verdana, sans-serif". Instead use Style Sheet and "sans-serif". Remember "Dynamic Font" from Netscape? "You want me to download some fonts just to look at your text page?" How silly is that?
I like to consider web programming, with HTML, CSS, images and other sources, an art form. An elegant programmer can (and will) create a well layout page using minimum amount of code. Not some hacks that know how to convert a .doc file into a "web" page or make an image map with DreamWeaver.
So yeah the 5k contest was interesting, but I would rather see more real examples of people writing good clean web page.
====
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
Isn't 512K a much rounder number? With winners being a member of the 'helf-meg club'?
The "You have Been Slash Doted and Survived Without A Crash" award? That would really mean something to a web admin...
Plug for my website:
Wireless Networking Systems
Network over a 15 mile radius!
Create your own Wireless ISP!
www.techsplanet.com/wlan/
Of course we could do amazing things in the long lines that Applesoft BASIC gave us - 127 char I think?
I understand the APL programmers were the real stars at "one line of code" though.
As they say - the Lord created the world in 6 days, but an APL programmer could do it in on line.
R.
How about a 5k operating system contest?
Just because I can imagine doing a hippopotamus, doesn't mean I'd like to do it.
Are you sure it isn't a way to make you cringe, by waiting for 5 minutes to download a 5k website?
I'm not a Troll i prefer to be called a Goblin.
It's efficiency? I'm all in favour of efficiency, but when the useful information is near zero, you get a very bad ratio, no matter how little resources you used.
It's a way of reflecting about the design, by adding constraints? That would be a wonderful idea. If they stated a goal, lets say design a web site with the periodic table of elements, and some strong size limitations, and let people use their minds on it, that would be something, IMHO. That perhaps would provide us with useful insights. But with no goals, it's only a collection of nonsense. I'm not particularly interested in how somebody solved a problem of his or her own invention, where the specifications could be changed at will.
It has no point, it's simply a fun site? Well, I have seen funnier.
So for me it's just another self-congratulation site. I have no time for it now, I must contemplate my navel, I think...Oh my! Isn't it interesting?...I think I'll forget everything about the outside world...ohmmmmm...
--
Rome taught me patience and assiduous application to detail. Virtues which temper the boldness of great, general views.
Look i don't want to take anything away from this competition but what is the point of manipulating you page to be less than a certain size. I'm all for small pages, without stupid graphics, java applets, flash, etc... but this seems more like a gimmick than anything else. As someone said before, if this was the 5k & useful poll then maybe it would mean something. (Hell, i know hundreds of sites that are less than 5k... too bad they're all crap :-) )
can't sleep slashdot will eat me