Updates:

+ Changed (again) the copy on the left column. Wording things well is very, very hard.

+ Re-added # people interested to the dropdown lists.

+ Bolded the 1K added daily label.

Thoughts:

+ Now that the design updates are settling down, I need to start thinking about how I’m going to attract new visitors to the site.

+ Expect a long month-in-review post to celebrate Domain Pigeon’s 1 month anniversary next Sunday.

+ I purchased On Writing Well after reading about it on HackerNews. Besides becoming a better writer, I hope to pick up a lot on web design, as I think there are a lot of similarities between the two disciplines.

+ I spent most of the morning trying to figure out how to crawl Google so that I can display the number search results next to the domain names on Domain Pigeon. With a little luck, visitors to Domain Pigeon will be able to sort by the number of Google search results in about a week. For example, there’s 29 search results for iInsomniacs. How fascinating!

As it turns out, Google doesn’t like people crawling their site. Isn’t it ironic, don’t you think? At least they apologize:

After a few hours of toying with timeouts, I can now happily report that I am crawling Google at the breakneck rate of two searches per minute. Technically, I’m not even supposed to do this, but I doubt my low intensity campaign will cause any alarms to go off. At least I hope not.

It’s a calculated risk. If they don’t Google ban me (please don’t Google ban me) I get to add a valuable metric to Domain Pigeon which will will make it easier for people find good domain names. If they do Google ban me, I’m pretty much screwed, as my entire online identity is in their hands.

But hey, Domain Pigeon is three weeks old and you’re supposed to fail early, right?

I decided I don’t want Domain Pigeon to claim it has free domain names when it actually doesn’t. Using the word free to attract traffic to the site is dishonest, no matter how I tried to rationalize it.

I imagine a conversation with a new visitor:

“Free domain names? Really?”

“Well, not really, you still have to pay the registration fee.”

“So its not actually free…”

“No one owns it, so, in that sense it’s free.”

“That’s not what free means”

“Yeah but if got you to come to the site didn’t it?”

“Go screw yourself”

“Fair enough”

With that in mind, domains are now available. They’re not free. They never were.

Screw the numbers. It’s not worth it.

The news:

Domains are now added once per day instead of throughout the day like it has been for the last several days. Doing it this way will let me emphasize the daily additions as well as result in a more colorful homepage, since more people will be able to explore the same set of domains throughout the day.

I’m on the east coast. Most techies are on the west coast. 2PM EST = 11AM PST, which seems like a good middle ground.

On a less significant note, I changed the fonts and colors of the domain count and the countdown timer. It looks better now, but I think it could still use some work.

Coming along…

It just wasn’t right before and I couldn’t put my finger on it until today: there was no contrast between the white content and the light gray outside area. All my attempts to make the colors soothing had created this big gray amorphous blob. By using the off-black color, it really helps the content stand out.

Few other changes:

Frequency: 120 domains every 3 hours, or 960 domains/day instead of 60 every 60 minutes (1440/day). Originally I had planned on doing 1/minute, but the more I saw it in action the more it didn’t seem viable. By pushing all the recent domain names off the front page quickly it minimized the variety of colors on the homepage. 90% of the time it was entirely white. By reducing how often the domains are added it will help preserve some of the previous visitor’s browsing history. It’s also less crazy.

Go GoDaddy: The dropdown boxes now have only links to GoDaddy. They’re my best performing affiliate, I like their service (I use them to manage my domain names), and their support is fantastic. Also, more selection may have actually been detrimental to click through rates of new users.

Hover vs Click: No more clicking on the homepage domains. All you have to do is hover and it’ll take care of the drop down for you. Why the change? Again, more color. The downside: the domain name verification with Verisign is no longer visible; it all takes place in the background. The dropdown reflects the status of the domain when the page was last loaded. This actually doesn’t matter too much because 99% of the time available domain names are going to result in an available status from the WHOIS server.

Other things that changed: the wording on the left column (again) and the You+Me… moved to the top, as it was just out of place on the side.

The rounded corners on the content area are courtesy of roundedcornr.com, which automates the whole process.

Getting there…