Apparently etune.com is available... cooler than any of my domains, and randomly generated. Nice.
Nope. etune.com is taken. Some of the "available" results being returned are not correct.
Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
31–40 of 44 posts
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#32What 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.
Here's another one: says "ece" is available. http://d.pr/i/fiRF
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#33Earlier quoted context omitted.
Any tips to sort this out? How are things being rate limited? edit: just realised you meant that twitter/github etc are rate limiting my requests. Bummer.
Just hit the profile page URL and get the HTTP staus code. If https://twitter.com/ksdhbfslbflsdbs returns 404, it's not available. Not quit the same (a username might be reserved internally), but either way, nobody else can use the name.
Yep, thats pretty much how it works at the moment (see https://github.com/trevorah/usernique/blob/master/server.js). The issue is that the server is sending out quite a few of these hits to twitter, and twitter is smart enough to start reject requests when things get a bit too much.
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#34Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
I'd be wary of doing automated whois lookups, which might be considered abusive / against terms of service depending on which server you hit.
Good point. This doesnt sound like a quick fix.
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#35Earlier quoted context omitted.
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
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
Just hit the profile page URL and get the HTTP staus code. If https://twitter.com/ksdhbfslbflsdbs returns 404, it's not available. Not quit the same (a username might be reserved internally), but either way, nobody else can use the name.
Yep, thats pretty much how it works at the moment (see https://github.com/trevorah/usernique/blob/master/server.js ). The issue is that the server is sending out quite a few of these hits to twitter, and twitter is smart enough to start reject requests when things get a bit too much.
I'm not a node guy, but I found this module for Whois checks - https://npmjs.org/package/whois-available
It uses the IANA Whois service, an admittedly cursory look doesn't turn up anything re: rate limits, but you could just do a get request on the root url and only check Whois if it 404s to be safe.
http://www.iana.org/whois
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#37Any feedback would be really cool...
Is there a way to have the checks performed for a given username? That would seem a lot more useful to me...
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#38Apparently etune.com is available... cooler than any of my domains, and randomly generated. Nice.
Nope. etune.com is taken. Some of the "available" results being returned are not correct.
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.
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep, thats pretty much how it works at the moment (see https://github.com/trevorah/usernique/blob/master/server.js ). The issue is that the server is sending out quite a few of these hits to twitter, and twitter is smart enough to start reject requests when things get a bit too much.
I'm not a node guy, but I found this module for Whois checks - https://npmjs.org/package/whois-available It uses the IANA Whois service, an admittedly cursory look doesn't turn up anything re: rate limits, but you could just do a get request on the root url and only check Whois if it 404s to be safe. http://www.iana.org/whois
Whois wouldn't help here. The problem is that so many requests are going to twitter.com/[username] that they start sending false 404s (or some other error, not 200) because of rate limiting.
Re: Show HN - usernique.com: Generate usernames and check availability
#40What 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.
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.
The quickest way I've found is to do a DNS lookup, and if that fails, hit the WHOIS.