

Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability - trevorah
http://www.usernique.com

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bdc
What are you using to determine whether *.io domains are "free" vs "taken"? It
seems to be incorrect.

    
    
      http://www.usernique.com/io/x
      -- "free"
    
      http://www.nic.io/cgi-bin/whois?query=x.io
      -- The domain is unavailable for use.

~~~
trevorah
just checking the return code on a GET request. src is on github if you're
curious. You're right though, looks like the domain lookups need a bit of
work.

~~~
rajivm
You should do a "whois" lookup for the domain. The return code for a 'get'
request on the domain has no bearing on its availability -- many parked
domains do not even have DNS configured, let alone HTTP.

~~~
cbhl
I'd be wary of doing automated whois lookups, which might be considered
abusive / against terms of service depending on which server you hit.

~~~
trevorah
Good point. This doesnt sound like a quick fix.

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scrapcode
Idea is awesome. I like how the usernames are generated in the first place. It
doesn't work, however. I've been looking for simple things that I can hack up
to help me learn ruby, so I made a little Ruby version using this idea.
"UNameGen"

<https://github.com/scrapcode/ruby-unamegen>

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Avalaxy
I love, it has some great user name suggestions. It would be great if it would
check some more sites.

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alexvr
Apparently etune.com is available... cooler than any of my domains, and
randomly generated. Nice.

~~~
mijustin
Nope. etune.com is taken. Some of the "available" results being returned are
not correct.

~~~
dag11
I noticed this too. It said "ely.com" is available, which was strange because
most (all?) 3-character .com's are registered. And yeah, ely.com is
registered.

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alexvr
Sweet! I love this name: etabocagi

Sounds like an indigenous tribe or something

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ponyous
It seems like every username starts with vowel.

~~~
trevorah
Yeah, it's very basic. If you check out the src, you can see that it is vowel,
consonant, vowel... Basic, but it kinda works.

------
trevorah
Any feedback would be really cool...

~~~
conroy
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>

~~~
citricsquid
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.

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

~~~
conroy
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>

~~~
trevorah
awesome, good find!

