Friday, November 25, 2005

November 25, 2005

FIXED:
- On rare occasions, a "reference not set to an instance of an object" exception message was displayed. A friendlier and more meaningful message is now displayed instead.
- Improved accuracy for lookups. Some domains were reported as available even if they were not. This has been fixed for most TLDs, work is in progress for the others.

NOTE:
These bugs were reported by users. If you find more bugs, please let me know! I usually fix them the same day. Thanks for helping me improve this service.

Thursday, November 24, 2005

November 24, 2005

ADDED:
- Domain hacks! For example, if you look "delicious.com" up and it comes back as registered, AjaxWhois will suggest alternatives such as "del.icio.us"! Hacks work with all the TLDs we support.

Tuesday, November 22, 2005

The reasons behind the Captcha validation

AjaxWhois.com has been online for less than a week and it has already received well over 500,000 hits (yes! half a million!). Many from legitimate users, but some were from bots and abusers.

In order to assure the best possible service to our legitimate users, we decided to implement a fair and simple Captcha validation scheme.

Each time you pass validation, you are given 30 credits. Each domain lookup will cost you 1 credit, and each Whois is 5 credits. When you run out of credit, you may simply validate yourself again for 30 more credits.

That means you can do up to 30 domain lookups (plus the suggestions provided by the system) or 6 Whois queries before validating a second time.

We feel this is a fair trade-off. What do you think?

November 22, 2005

ADDED:
- Captcha validation.

Monday, November 21, 2005

November 21, 2005

AjaxWhois.com is featured on TechCrunch! Here's a link.

AjaxWhois.com featured on The Web Hosting Show (Podcast #38). Here's a link.

ADDED:
- Data caching added. This will greatly improve speed.

Sunday, November 20, 2005

November 20, 2005

I was forced to temporarily remove .COM, .NET and .ORG lookups and whois because of abuse from some users.

I am working on a way to prevent abuse and give a better overall experience. Stay tuned!

Saturday, November 19, 2005

Technology behind AjaxWhois.com

I've received a lot of e-mails regarding the technology behind AjaxWhois. I'm glad to share this information with you!

FRONT END:
- The front end (ie: GUI) has been hand-coded in HTML and CSS. I tried to follow standards as much as possible. For this reason, the site renders perfectly on all browsers (that I know of).
- The Ajax part has been coded with Javascript. The front end makes calls to the server.

BACK END:
- Programmed with ASP.NET 1.1 using Visual Studio 2003. The code is 100% compatible with Mono and can run on Windows or Linux servers.
- The user interface is currently hosted on Windows 2000 servers
- PostgreSql database for caching and server list, hosted on Linux servers

Last modified: November 21, 2005

November 19, 2005

FIXED:
- now works with all caps domain names. (duh!)
- Better handling of multi-part TLD (ex: .me.uk was not recognized. Not queries the .uk server)

November 18, 2005

ADDED:
- Domain backorder link with SnapNames
- Improved accuracy
- Better Whois for .com and .net domains. Now whois directly with the domain registrar

FIXED:
- Improved Javascript domain validation. (was broken with 2 letters domain names and domains starting with www. for example)
- Fixed the "object reference not set to an instance of an object" bug when whois'ing (hey, it worked on localhost!)

TO COME:
- Faster domain suggest

Thursday, November 17, 2005

November 17, 2005

OFFICIAL AJAXWHOIS.COM LAUNCH!