User:Kennylucius
From AwardAnnals
If you have problems with or comments on the site that are not appropriate for the talk page, feel free to use the Emailuser/Kennylucius page. If you have a problem with registration or login (and cannot use the email page), send a message to webmaster at awardannals dotcom.
If you are merely curious about the genius from which sprang this awesome website, read on.
The Man
The Award Annals was conceived and executed by Kenny Lucius. Kenny (who is speaking of himself in the third person for some reason) is a resident of Fullerton, California. He lives in a Craftsman bungalow with a cuddle of cats, one dog, at least 30 goldfish, at least a billion ants, and his beloved Sue. You'll find more than you wanted to know about Kenny on his homepage. Send him a private message (you'll have to register first) because he'll read anything, including praise, suggestions, rants, and “is this thing on?”. He may not always respond, though, and he doesn't do research for term papers.
If you have a site of your own and you want Kenny’s help, have a look at WikiPresto.
If you want to support the site, which is always in the red, you can make a donation or just purchase anything from an associated bookseller like Amazon.com by clicking one of the links provided on this site. It doesn't even have to be a book: iPods, DVDs, clothing...whatever. We get a small commission with every purchase resulting from a link on this site.
The Conception
The site started in the summer of ’04 from an unfulfilled desire to buy a good sci-fi book. Kenny had checked every Harry Potter book out of the Fullerton Public Library, and Book 6 seemed a long way off. He didn't like any of the sites that listed Hugo and Nebula awards—they just weren't set up for browsing. Kenny wanted a list of winners and nominees grouped by year so he could have a month’s worth of reading on one page. He wanted to see the cover art, read a synopsis, and see the prices without having to cross-reference or click all over Amazon. Just one simple page.
Of course, this seemingly simple desire snowballed into a database of thousands of honored titles. It continues to grow.
The Nerd
Kenny started with a Titanium PowerBook running OS X 10.3. Using only TextEdit, his page took shape. Then he installed MySQL along with CocoaMySQL which he extended to facilitate the gathering of book data. Arrangements were made to host the site with an altogether cheap host. Kenny had to learn PHP (very similar to C, fortunately) to program a web interface to the database. The nature of search engine crawlers demanded simplification of the design—no frames, more keywords, and a more straightforward document structure.
Then, rather suddenly at the end of August ’04, it all came together. Kenny froze the design and concentrated on adding books. In just a few weeks, the first fifteen awards were well-populated with winners and nominees—most of them back to 1990.
Currently, Award Annals is the largest wiki hosted by WikiPresto. The development and testing is now done on an iMac with Apache, PHP, MySQL, and Dreamweaver. Early in 2007, Kenny abandoned his homespun system for MediaWiki for various reasons, not the least of which is to allow others to contribute to the site and add awards for music, art, or whatever.
