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Comment by trevorah | Hacker News Reader

Any feedback would be really cool...

You should add more services! I wrote http://handlehelp.com which checks for username availability across multiple sites. It's open source[1], so you can use some of my checks if you'd like.

[1]: https://github.com/kyleconroy/handlehelp

Good idea, thanks!

Regarding the reddit check, a username can be unavailable for registration even if there is no profile, after an account is deleted the username is reserved forever. Not sure if there is any way to check if a username is actually available with out trying to register it. For example "citricsquid" is unavailable on reddit but your service reports it is available.

Damn, I only just added the reddit check. Looks like I might have to revert that...

Just found the API that reddit uses to check for usernames[1]. I'll be adding it to handlehelp right now.

[1]: http://www.reddit.com/api/username_available.json?user=foo

awesome, good find!

Could you include domain names (.com, maybe .io/.ly) and maybe Facebook url? If you had those this could be great for finding pronounceable names.

It's be great if you could set it so that it would just keep trying until it found one that was available on all services, but I can see that adding a ton of overhead, so I can see why you haven't done that yet.

I've just added the .io and i'll add .com in a bit. Adding in the loop might be a bit much if you're not bothered about certain services - e.g constantly updating the page just because a twitter name cant be found.

Yeah, I agree. You could do a sortable list of services so the user could rank their importance and then pick the best result from the first X(10?) iterations given their preferences. Obviously, that adds a lot of complexity, you just got me excited.

Fork it and try it out! https://github.com/trevorah/usernique

Should look up the domain name too.

And what's the point in showing the ones that are taken?

Wow, that was fast. I love that you're literally rolling out new features while I refresh this thread. Kudos!

github+heroku baby!

Is there a way to have the checks performed for a given username? That would seem a lot more useful to me...

You should include some form of timeouting. I purposely have Reddit blocked on my computer, and the page wouldn't finish loading because of that.

you should be clearer about what the site does without ruining the simplicity. I was shown the site and didn't notice the title, so it caught me off guard. it appeared to be someone's about page rather than a generator.

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