Show HN: I crossed a thesaurus with a domain availability checking API | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: I crossed a thesaurus with a domain availability checking API

domainmasher.com

113 pointsgrinnick43 comments

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.

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

Also it's getting kinda killed at the moment which is why the availability checks are coming back kinda slow and are sometimes failing.

Should settle down after the rush is over.

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 :)

Nice idea and nice UI! facebook.com is taken but im getting grimaceledger.com!

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.

(Sorry to start a second thread but it's separate from the language issue.) Is it just me that thinks the controls on the lists work upside down?

I find I want to use the arrows to move the box through the list, not move the list through the box.

I am not a UX guy by any stretch of the imagination, so this is just an observation rather than a judgement.

I think it's just like when you try to play a games console game and the Y-axis is inverted. Some people think it's normal, some people hate it.

I love this idea, but I was thinking the same thing about the arrows. They feel backwards to me.

I did, too. Different UI, though. See http://www.domainjig.com

Really cool! What are you using for availability checking? You're getting so many and they're coming in so fast!?

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.

Cool, I might look into doing that instead. Thanks.

This one is great too. Any others that are similar that folks know about? Leandomainsearch.com is pretty great too

That's awesome.. it shows michael.org as available though, which it isn't :( got my hopes up!

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!

  wolf
  woman chaser
  skirt chaser
  kitchen utensil (??)
  philanderer
  womaniser
  womanizer

--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

Hands off knowledgebaseskirtchaser.com - it's MINE.

Sure, sure, but I got dibs on 'socioeconomicclasskitchenutensil.com'

(to the author - cool tool, I may actually use this for future domain ideas)

Great. Glad you like it.

A masher is a kitchen utensil: https://www.google.ie/search?q=potato+masher&hl=en&s...

See it all makes perfect sense.

More than that, it's actually the only one that makes sense (to me)!

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!

Indeed. Great job! I found some great combos for my own projects :)

Very nice.

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).

Would you consider open sourcing this eventually?

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.

Cool idea!

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.

Also, the UI would get pretty nuts right?

Is it possible to run the domain availability checks from the client-side with AJAX?

Not sure to be honest but probably not. My availability checks eventually go through this ruby gem: http://www.ruby-whois.org/

Basically it just does a whois lookup on the domain and I don't think I could replicate that behavior from the client side.

Edit: This comment says it would be possible http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5132750

But not client-side. Still, better to just do a DNS lookup (not rate-limited) than WHOIS.

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.

Thanks! Although, if this post gets in any way popular I'm sure we'll see just how slow it can get!

I have weak design skills at all so for me, bootstrap is incredibly valuable when building things like this. It's great.

Previously, sort of: http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/04/19117

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.

Wow! So smart this is something I do when coming up with domain names but nice to simplify it, making it incredibly faster.

Yeah that's why I made it. I was doing the same thing over and over with a thesaurus so I just decided to automate the process.

I've wanted something like this to exist! Thanks!

Awsome, I like how quick it is.

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