Wife: why can’t I find adenosinetriphosphate anymore?
me: i deleted it :)
Wife: I thought that was an awesome domain :(
me: was that you voting it up? lol
Wife: I never clicked it
Wife: put it back on
Wife: just because you don’t like it doesn’t mean others wont
me: haha no one will register that hun
Wife: me and my coworker were thinking about it if we were to have a site

I’m very happy with the way things went today. There were no major problems and the feedback from HackerNews was, as always, insightful and constructive.

I spent the majority of the day making lots of minor changes, which is reflected by my responses in the thread.

HN Todo List:

Scrolling through the comments, these are the tasks that stand out:

• Need to add “Register Now” links to various registrars
• Add the ability to do custom keyword searches
• Consider targeting domain name collectors, as they are a big audience
• Improve the price display on the registration page and maybe move it to the homepage
• Search feature should be more prominent

By the Numbers:

• 3,567 page views by 1,661 visitors
• Avg Time on Site: 1:47
• 3 registrations, though all 3 abandoned at the payment page.
• Whois Lookups: 1,511 (note: that’s a 91% participation rate on the homepage — usability success)
• Most importantly… Domains Registered: 8

I emailed two of people who signed up but didn’t complete the payment to find out if there were any problems. No, one of them said, he just didn’t see the price. Probably the same with the other two.

Notes:

– IE6: I hate you still. (more on this tomorrow)

– Not many people explored the domains past the first two pages. Need to find some way of improving this. It will be interesting to see what the results are when I start promoting the site within the domain name community.

– Need to improve the organization of the domains on the homepage. Most of those 1,511 clicks went to the Top 10 list (which is the first thing you see). Since the colors are all relative, this caused all the ones in the Recent section to be skewed heavily towards white.

– At the beginning of the day I wasn’t limiting the view count to unique IP addresses. After about two hours, someone started voting up domain names like adenosinetriphosphate.com, which got placed in the top 10 list. It’s unlikely anyone is going to register it, so it would have stayed there ad infinitum until some other prankster found a stupider one to upvote. So, I limited it to one vote/IP, which helped, but it may still be a problem. This will largely be fixed by finding a better way to organize the front page.

– Another startup launched about the same time as Domain Pigeon on HN. It was interesting watching the two threads all day. Their site, Taxi Mogul, received more initial upvotes and stayed a few places higher than Domain Pigeon most of the day. Currently, we’ve both received about the same number of votes, but DP has about twice as many comments, which is likely a function of me relentless responding to every comment, even if just to say thanks. Ultimately, promotion on HackerNews, like TechCrunch, doesn’t matter much. It’s what you do afterward the initial traffic that matters.

– On that note, it’s been a long day and tomorrow will be busy too.

I’ve been making small improvements to Domain Pigeon throughout the day based on the initial feedback.

Most were through the HackerNews thread, but one particularly helpful visitor, Hoan, emailed me with several suggestions including the following:

* Instead of “Views 64” perhaps you could say “64 people interested in this domain” (conversions could go up…)
* You can get rid of “Added on Jan X”, and make the previous statement larger

Result:

Before:

After:

Good suggestion — Thank you Hoan.

Keep ’em coming.

Scrolling through Domain Pigeon’s log file, I see:

ActionController::RoutingError (No route matches "/MSOffice/cltreq.asp" with {:method=>:get})

What’s going on here? My first impression was that someone was probing the site for vulnerabilities, but it turns out that’s not the case. Googling points to the answer:

Is someone attempting to hack my system? No, Not really.

These are requests from a user who has installed Microsoft Office and Internet Explorer, and who has enabled the “Discuss” toolbar in his browser. When that toolbar is enabled, the browser will automatically query for these two files when visiting each site, to determine whether the Office Server Extensions are installed.

Microsoft, was there not a better way to do this?

Here goes nothing.

Cross-posted from HackerNews:

The short of it:
Domain Pigeon helps you find unregistered domain names for your websites. Please let me know what you think.

The long of it:
In March of last year I was in the process of writing some poker software and trying to decide on a name for it. I wanted a good name and also wanted to own the corresponding domain name so that people could easily find it. I used Ajaxwhois, a great site that lets shows you the availability of domain names as you type, and quickly got pulled in trying to find a good domain. I would spend hours trying things like “pokerguru.com”, “pokermaster.com”, “pokercalculator.com”, “pokerexpert.com”, and so on. After a lot of time and energy later, I found “allinexpert.com”, which became the name of the software.

Fast forward to about July. ALL IN Expert had just flopped and I was trying to decide on a new project to work on. I had several ideas in mind and again, I wanted a good domain name for whatever it wound up being. It was kind of sick: I wound up going back to Ajaxwhois and using it as the tie breaker. If I could find a good domain name for one project and not the other, that would be what I worked on.

It was crazy. There’s got to be a better way. I wrote a small piece of software that played with various word combinations and displayed their availability.  Surprisingly, there are a lot of decent domains out there… you just have to be patient enough or resourceful enough to find them.

Then it hit me: This is something other people could use too. I put the other ideas on the back burner and started on this one.

Domain Pigeon, an eccentric but hopefully memorable name I discovered with the same software, is intended to make finding unregistered domain names easier. It has been my learn Rails/JavaScript/web development nights and weekends project over the last few months. I hope you like it.

This is round two of its launch. Last week I posted a link to Philly on Rails, a local group of Rails aficionados, and received a lot of great feedback. The result is what you see today (hopefully, depending on how DreamHost does with the traffic).

I’ve got a list of about two dozens features I intend to add over the coming weeks, which will be modified and prioritized based on your feedback.

For me, Domain Pigeon has been as much about learning the process as it has been about the releasing the product. On that note, all feedback, positive and negative, is welcomed. I also keep a blog, mattmazur.com, where I write about Domain Pigeon and its progress for anyone that is interested. I try to be as transparent as possible, as that’s the best way to get valuable feedback.

On a final note, a lot of the design decisions for Domain Pigeon were adapted from feedback given to other people launching their sites on HackerNews and for that, I owe you all a thank you.

Please let me know what you think.