In case anyone is interested, this is a really bare Rails app which basically just delegates to two open source Ruby gems I wrote and does some caching to try and improve result fetching speed and cut down on api requests.
That was great, Thanks! I actually found a surprisingly good domain for my next project. My apologies if I squeezed you out of a referral credit. I processed it via DreamHost just to consolidate my all domains.
Great tool though! Maybe put up a Donate button and every time I find a domain, I'll send some Karma $$ your way
Haha no worries. I just link to name.com because it's what I like to use for my own domain purchases (of which there are many!). Of course I do get a referral fee but it's pretty small so I won't lose any sleep over it.
I wonder how difficult it'd be to offer a range of referral options, I know if you had Namecheap on there you would have caught me and potentially many others :)
hahaha, grimaceledger.com ... that is hilarious. People in the office must have thought I was mad; as I was laughing while going through some permutations of domain names.
You can usually just hit the DNS for the domain, and if it doesn't respond you can assume it's not taken. You might hit a couple of domains that are registered with no NS set, but they are few and far between. I've used a similar process before and been able to check hundreds of domains a second.
In your case you could probably do a DNS check, display "probably available", and in the background do the time consuming WHOIS scrape.
I'm not quite sure what it's trying to say to me here, but with the exception of 'wolf' and 'kitchen utensil' the second column is rather, err, theme limited and slightly insulting!
--edit-- OK, it took me a while (more coffee needed), this is just the thesaurus result for 'masher' isn't it? Is this an American thesaurus as I have never heard the word 'masher' used to refer to a womaniser before. Kitchen utensil perhaps, maybe some sort of industrial machinery...
/British
--edit 2-- Yup, the womanising aspect is missing from British English thesauruses (oxford, macmillan) AFAICT. You learn something every day
I love this idea. I did a couple of toy searches and found some pretty great domain names. This sort've feels like one of those "Why didn't I think of that" ideas. Which means... Good Job!
It needs a little work on UI. When you select something in the lower end of a list it's very difficult to see the higher end (which is out of the screen) of that list. I'd keep the two main boxes at the top but rather than moving the list up and down make it stay the way it is and make the chosen word selected instead (more like a list of radio buttons without using radio buttons).
I'm just curious about how you did some things like:
The tweet/like buttons. Did you go and make them on their respective sites, or is there a gem that let's you drop in a URL?
The sliding selects(?) used to pick a name are a cool widget. Not obvious to me how you'd go about doing something like that.
I can't really open source the main Rails app "as is" because it would present a security issue for me.
The Tweet/Like buttons just come from the Twitter and Facebook developer sites (for example: https://dev.twitter.com/docs/tweet-button). You just generate the code there and paste it into your site. Although, if you want a gem for generating them you could try this: https://github.com/dtuite/flakey
The sliding inputs are custom built with Backbone.js and they probably wouldn't be too easy to replicate unless you're handy with JS and Backbone. However, I put most of the code into a gist for you so you can check it out if you like: https://gist.github.com/4663167
Dependencies for code that are
1. Backbone for structure
2. Backbone Marionette for general code organization
3. jStorage for accessing localStorage.
I think to make it really useful you should be comparing all of the permutations (at least for one of the columns) for me without me having to click through each one by hand. If I give you a word it's already pretty clear that the word is taken and I'm looking for alternatives.
It's tough because it's not as difficult as you might imagine to get your IP address rate limited. If a lot of people were using it at once and I was sending out hundreds of availability checking requests I'd probably hit the limits.
For example, I had this hosted on Heroku for a while and tons of requests were failing because Heroku uses shared IP addresses for all the sites it hosts. Evidently I wasn't the only person doing domain availability checks from their network.
Nice! Could you mix in some foreign dictionaries too? When I have a word, I'd like to see alternatives for it in French, Spanish, Nordic, Italian, Japanese (English-spelling) etc... lets me be creative and keep the central theme of my brand present :)
Really nice. The only suggestion I have putting some kind of animated progress indicator instead of just the text "waiting". If it takes more than a second you tend to wonder what's going on, especially non technical users.
Agreed. Some load indicator, or "..." (in gray) will be more natural in this environment. "Waiting" can be perceived as "waiting for you to register" / suspended etc :)
Nice one! I like how fast it is, compared to the most of the domain registration sites that I use to check availability. Not to mention the simple and clean look of bootstrap.
This is really cool. Is there way to set maximum/minimum word lengths for the checkboxes? Because I wouldn't really want a long domain for any of my sites.
One gem is a wrapper for the Big Huge Labs Thesaurus API: https://github.com/dtuite/dinosaurus
The other is a wrapper for the Ruby Whois gem. It adds Twitter and Facebook availability checking functions: https://github.com/dtuite/name_checker