How would I wire up a christmas light ballast, would it be wired up like a regular 2 wire preheat choke?

How would I wire up a christmas light ballast, would it be wired up like a regular 2 wire preheat choke?

Yes, in series. That's actually how GE Britesticks are wired. The resistor spreads the heat over the back plate driving F20T12 with a starter.  The input power is 33W with 60/40 power allocation, so it was not very efficient. 

The big limitation is that the OCV is limited to line voltage, so you can only start lamps that can start with 120v line voltage after pre-heat.

I have a 100 set with no connector on one end, would I wire that like the preheat choke? BTW I'm manually preheating it

Yes...

Also, you can use a regular light bulb, or a small heating element, like crankcase heater from an air conditioner.

Can anyone put up maybe a simple wiring diagram? I can't seem to figure the thing out!

The hot black wire goes to one NEMA plug of the christmas light string.  The other NEMA plug wire goes to one pin of the fluorescent light.  the other pin from the same end goes to starter/manual switch.  The starter/manual switch wire goes to the opposite end pin.  The other pin at the same end goes to neutral white.

Does that help?

Yep, sure does! thanks! I was able to light this lamp with a broken cathode with a standard preheat, by shorting the bad end, would that work for this too?

I rigged my setup using a cheesie LOA F15 fixture.  I simply disconnected the ballast from the lampholder and power, then moved the power wire that fed the ballast directly into the lampholder.  I then cut the hot wire of an extension cord and seriesed it with the light.  Anything I plug into the cord's receptacle is a "ballast".  I have used a fan, a squirrel cage blower, Christmas lights, C7 twinkle Christmas lights, LED Christmas lights(it takes a LOT of these!), an incandescent 40 watt light bulb, and have tried several other things like a radio and another fluorescent light fixture, but it does not work well.
40 watts of power seems to drive the F15 perfectly.