Nomulous Blog » ZI.GS

How to get your very own two-letter domain

nomulous — Tue, 06 Oct 2009 03:03:31 +0000

I’m sure most of you internet people have heard of the various URL shortening sites out there in the wild. They’re used to make a long and scary URL (which stands for Uniform Resource Locator) into one much more timid and digestible. Blah blah blah. The point is, you may have noticed that all the good ones (tinyurl.com is ugly and commercial and gross, bit.ly is an exception) have a domain that is only two letters long, like tr.im. Now how do they do it?

Most big hosting companies and domain registrars will not only tell you a domain any less than three letters is invalid, but they probably won’t support whichever obscure ccTLD (Country Code Top Level Domain, e.g. .ca for Canada) you feel like owning. There’s no real reason for this, other than that most companies are stupid and don’t know what the hell they’re doing. Especially when it comes to technological stuff like this; the CEO of GoDaddy probably doesn’t have more than a vague idea about how the internet really works. Oh well, more power to the people.

And by “the people” I mean the people at iwantmyname.com. Not only is their service great, with a nice clean interface and a whole six pages of TLDs to choose from, but they accept ANY valid domain, including those with only two characters at the second level.

It’s a great service, and I’ve used them to buy all two of my two letter domains. I even started a little URL shortening service of my own, called zi.gs, just for fun. I took it down a while ago after it became boring and tiresome to provide support for.

Anyways, there you have it. Easy two character domains, supporting lots and lots of TLDs.

ZI.GS is no more

nomulous — Sat, 29 Aug 2009 18:33:32 +0000

The not-so-legendary URL shortener has been a fun development project, and I’ve learned a lot from it’s creation. However, after reading about it in approximately seven different places, I have decided that URL shorteners aren’t good for the internet as a whole, and that I no longer support their use. They have only one legitimate use really, and that is Twitter. And for Twitter, there are a hundred shorteners out there already with way better interfaces, reliability, and support.

ZI.GS, requiescat in pace.

ZI.GS updates: captcha removed, API in progress

nomulous — Fri, 10 Jul 2009 16:39:53 +0000

Robots rejoice! ZI.GS no longer requires a Captcha challenge-response in order to create short URLs. It was removed to make the service smoother and easier to use. Since most other services did not have them, it seemed to be more annoying than useful.

Also, plans for the future! A ZI.GS API (Application Programming Interface) is in the process of development. This will allow programmers to design alternative (and even system-native) interfaces for exactly the same service.

So what are you waiting for? Shorten your URLs at ZI.GS!