Emoji domain checker
A small PHP tool that IDNA-encodes emoji and checks availability against the dot.tk registrar via cURL; a 2013-2014 experiment in emoji domain names.
- BPM
- 151
- GRADE
- C
- LEVEL
- 7
- RELEASES
- 0
- YEARS
- 2007–2014
Registering A Smiley
The whole idea fits in one function. checkDomain opens a cURL handle, hits my.dot.tk's registration endpoint with a domain name, sets the referer so the request looks like it came from their homepage, and searches the response for the phrase about registering the domain. If it's there, the name is available. If not, it's taken.
In front of that sat an IDNA converter with a version flag, 2003 or 2008, taken from the query string. IDNA is how a non-ASCII domain becomes something DNS can carry, and the two standards disagreed about which characters were allowed, which is exactly where emoji landed. Then the list: about a hundred emoji, faces and cats and devils and skulls and a pile of poo, pasted straight into the source with tabs between them.
So the tool encoded each one and asked the .tk registrar whether anybody had claimed it yet. Registrations were free, and you could own a single smiling face as a web address.
It never became a site or a domain I kept. I just wanted to see how far it went.
history
- archived