i realised that i am not ezrabutler on certain crucial sites. Thx!
Mauricio Reyes
· 1 year ago
Definitely adding this site to my bookmarks. Its been my life's mission to secure my username wherever possible since losing out on the .com version back in '97. I still wake up in the middle of the night over that one!
Raj
· 1 year ago
very nice tool. saves a lot of time :) Thanx!
connectionfailure
· 1 year ago
Nice work, except it didn't work after it hits the "Computerlove" site. It just hangs there and the little progress dots go on forever. There ought to be a checkbox next to each site so you can select the ones you want.
Thanks for the helpful tip. I must say I feel a small burst of excitement whenever my username is approved! I can truly say that I am a geek to the core. However, with the addition of this web site it makes me wonder how people have such more time in their day to search for these kinds of things? I guess procrastination plays a huge role. Nevertheless, every new social media/networking web site is ultimately going to lead to a life on the internet 24/7.
Richard Cunningham
· 1 year ago
The implementation of that site is really poor. Someone needs to tell them about doing parallel fetches with Curl, they could get all them done in about 10 seconds that way.
Jon
· 1 year ago
Hi all, thanks for the comments, glad the site is going over well and is as useful to others as it has been for us.
Couple of specific comments:
@Jeff thanks for the bookmarklet, we've managed to getting round to updating the site so it points at the register page if the username is available and the user if it's already taken, it had been on the to-do list for a while.
@connectionfailur I've taken computerlove out of the list as it was causing consistent issues - some sites just don't work well with the system. Ideally it would be great to be able to ping a URL that just told us if the username was available or taken and nothing else. Tipjoy and a few others have just that (Tipjoy actually built us a URL we could ping). That makes the ping faster and the response more accurate and it stops the sites needing to serve us the entire page.
@Richard Cunningham - rather than a poor implementation, I'd say it was a necessary implementation. Running all those curls in parallel when we were getting 50,000 hits a day would have crushed most hosting providers that were in our price range, and since the site is a pet project and has no budget our price range is cheap and cheerful. This issue has been further exacerbated by Googles decision yesterday to disable our adsense account with little or no explanation. This leaves me with a $100 a month hosting bill for a non profit pet project.... good job my wife understands my hobbies. :-)
jeff
· 1 year ago
This website blows. Is inaccurate and slow. Can't they do the checks in parallel so we DONT waste so much time watching it crawl through the needlessly long list?
And it gave me a false positive on friend feed.
Broken.
Richard Cunningham
· 1 year ago
Jon,
how are you counting hits? each page makes 65 AJAX requests I assume making that 66 for each user of the site.
Also I can't see curl being worse really, unless you assume that people give up on the page before it finishes, since the same number of remote requests are needed but the curl method has a lower memory footprint.
I would suggest a VPS system rather than shared hosting for something like this, probably a $20 slicehost machine would perform better than most shared hosting and few limitations.
Anyway, good luck and well done for getting on mashable.
Greg
· 1 year ago
File this one under testimonial:
http://usernamecheck.isfuckingaweso.me, period. No, really. I launched my site a few days before usernamecheck hit the tubes. By chance, Jon happened to discover the site and he added it to his list. Since then I've received a steady stream of new users, including Mr. Mashable ;)
I've spent $0 on marketing this site (aside from the logo competition I recently held over at crowdSPRING). Jon has a great service he can leverage with startups looking to attract new users. I'm not sure what the model is but maybe a premium could be had for being moved up the list.
Greg
· 9 months ago
Sadly, usernamecheck closed last week. I created a usernamecheck clone called http://myuserna.me in order to keep the dream alive. Stop by and give me some feedback. I’m going to add many more sites to check in the coming weeks.
All Comments
http://mashable.com/2007/09/17/password-managers/
There ought to be a checkbox next to each site so you can select the ones you want.
Couple of specific comments:
@Jeff thanks for the bookmarklet, we've managed to getting round to updating the site so it points at the register page if the username is available and the user if it's already taken, it had been on the to-do list for a while.
@connectionfailur I've taken computerlove out of the list as it was causing consistent issues - some sites just don't work well with the system. Ideally it would be great to be able to ping a URL that just told us if the username was available or taken and nothing else. Tipjoy and a few others have just that (Tipjoy actually built us a URL we could ping). That makes the ping faster and the response more accurate and it stops the sites needing to serve us the entire page.
@Richard Cunningham - rather than a poor implementation, I'd say it was a necessary implementation. Running all those curls in parallel when we were getting 50,000 hits a day would have crushed most hosting providers that were in our price range, and since the site is a pet project and has no budget our price range is cheap and cheerful. This issue has been further exacerbated by Googles decision yesterday to disable our adsense account with little or no explanation. This leaves me with a $100 a month hosting bill for a non profit pet project.... good job my wife understands my hobbies. :-)
And it gave me a false positive on friend feed.
Broken.
how are you counting hits? each page makes 65 AJAX requests I assume making that 66 for each user of the site.
Also I can't see curl being worse really, unless you assume that people give up on the page before it finishes, since the same number of remote requests are needed but the curl method has a lower memory footprint.
I would suggest a VPS system rather than shared hosting for something like this, probably a $20 slicehost machine would perform better than most shared hosting and few limitations.
Anyway, good luck and well done for getting on mashable.
http://usernamecheck.isfuckingaweso.me, period. No, really. I launched my site a few days before usernamecheck hit the tubes. By chance, Jon happened to discover the site and he added it to his list. Since then I've received a steady stream of new users, including Mr. Mashable ;)
I've spent $0 on marketing this site (aside from the logo competition I recently held over at crowdSPRING). Jon has a great service he can leverage with startups looking to attract new users. I'm not sure what the model is but maybe a premium could be had for being moved up the list.