Show HN: I crossed a thesaurus with a domain availability checking API

In case anyone is interested, this is a really bare Rails app which basically just delegates to two open source Ruby gems I wrote and does some caching to try and improve result fetching speed and cut down on api requests.<p>One gem is a wrapper for the Big Huge Labs Thesaurus API: <a href="https://github.com/dtuite/dinosaurus" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dtuite/dinosaurus</a><p>The other is a wrapper for the Ruby Whois gem. It adds Twitter and Facebook availability checking functions: <a href="https://github.com/dtuite/name_checker" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/dtuite/name_checker</a>

That was great, Thanks! I actually found a surprisingly good domain for my next project. My apologies if I squeezed you out of a referral credit. I processed it via DreamHost just to consolidate my all domains.<p>Great tool though! Maybe put up a Donate button and every time I find a domain, I'll send some Karma $$ your way

Nice idea and nice UI! facebook.com is taken but im getting grimaceledger.com!

(Sorry to start a second thread but it's separate from the language issue.) Is it just me that thinks the controls on the lists work upside down?<p>I find I want to use the arrows to move the box through the list, not move the list through the box.<p>I am not a UX guy by any stretch of the imagination, so this is just an observation rather than a judgement.

I did, too. Different UI, though. See <a href="http://www.domainjig.com" rel="nofollow">http://www.domainjig.com</a>

I'm not quite sure what it's trying to say to me here, but with the exception of 'wolf' and 'kitchen utensil' the second column is rather, err, theme limited and slightly insulting!<p><pre><code> wolf woman chaser skirt chaser kitchen utensil (??) philanderer womaniser womanizer </code></pre> --edit-- OK, it took me a while (more coffee needed), this is just the thesaurus result for 'masher' isn't it? Is this an American thesaurus as I have never heard the word 'masher' used to refer to a womaniser before. Kitchen utensil perhaps, maybe some sort of industrial machinery... /British<p>--edit 2-- Yup, the womanising aspect is missing from British English thesauruses (oxford, macmillan) AFAICT. You learn something every day

I love this idea. I did a couple of toy searches and found some pretty great domain names. This sort've feels like one of those "Why didn't I think of that" ideas. Which means... Good Job!

Very nice.<p>It needs a little work on UI. When you select something in the lower end of a list it's very difficult to see the higher end (which is out of the screen) of that list. I'd keep the two main boxes at the top but rather than moving the list up and down make it stay the way it is and make the chosen word selected instead (more like a list of radio buttons without using radio buttons).

Would you consider open sourcing this eventually?<p>I'm just curious about how you did some things like:<p>The tweet/like buttons. Did you go and make them on their respective sites, or is there a gem that let's you drop in a URL? The sliding selects(?) used to pick a name are a cool widget. Not obvious to me how you'd go about doing something like that.

Cool idea!<p>I think to make it really useful you should be comparing all of the permutations (at least for one of the columns) for me without me having to click through each one by hand. If I give you a word it's already pretty clear that the word is taken and I'm looking for alternatives.

Nice! Could you mix in some foreign dictionaries too? When I have a word, I'd like to see alternatives for it in French, Spanish, Nordic, Italian, Japanese (English-spelling) etc... lets me be creative and keep the central theme of my brand present :)

Really nice. The only suggestion I have putting some kind of animated progress indicator instead of just the text "waiting". If it takes more than a second you tend to wonder what's going on, especially non technical users.

Nice one! I like how fast it is, compared to the most of the domain registration sites that I use to check availability. Not to mention the simple and clean look of bootstrap.

Previously, sort of: <a href="http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/04/19117" rel="nofollow">http://www.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1999/04/19117</a>

This is really cool. Is there way to set maximum/minimum word lengths for the checkboxes? Because I wouldn't really want a long domain for any of my sites.

Wow! So smart this is something I do when coming up with domain names but nice to simplify it, making it incredibly faster.

I've wanted something like this to exist! Thanks!

Awsome, I like how quick it is.