Weird One Character Domain Superstore

January 23, 2018 10:03 AM

Weird One Character Domain Superstore... a dumb weekend project for Unicode / IDN domains which got out of control...

Obligatory Medium "How I Built This."

[via mefi projects]

posted by He Is Only The Imposter (37 comments total)

🜵.tk is available for the organizers of the next Women's March.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:42 AM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

It seems like these are only available through godaddy? Say it ain't so.
posted by aniola at 10:59 AM on January 23, 2018

I see a lot of squares. Apparently I don't have the right font support for many of those domains. 😢

But the rest are glorious, and I'm going to have to remind myself that I really, really don't need a set of futhark or ogham domains that nobody can find.
posted by ErisLordFreedom at 11:01 AM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

℻.dog was interesting, but then I saw ℻.pizza. but the .pizza one is $90 :(
posted by ArgentCorvid at 11:12 AM on January 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

There goes my wallet
posted by azarbayejani at 11:31 AM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

�.tk is available, but it's ~$40 for a really dumb joke.
posted by drfu at 11:33 AM on January 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

From the FAQ:

If you sell one character domains, why is your domain name so long?

I find myself asking "Why" about so many aspects of this, but the URL itself is not one of those aspects.
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:33 AM on January 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

It seems like these are only available through godaddy? Say it ain't so.

I copied 𐊶.net into Gandi's search and I was able to add it to my cart there, albeit for $18 instead of $12. So I guess you can get them elsewhere too.
posted by egregious theorem at 11:52 AM on January 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

Haha... glad people are enjoying my ridiculous creation. Here's the obligatory How I Built This article...
posted by ph00dz at 12:26 PM on January 23, 2018 [14 favorites]

One Weird Character That Will Something Something
posted by gottabefunky at 12:49 PM on January 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

I think №.army might be the weirdest single combination I've found so far, but ….tk is actually tempting as a short URL.
posted by fedward at 12:50 PM on January 23, 2018 [3 favorites]

Why did I just buy ᚐ.com ???
posted by Dr Ew at 12:56 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

HOW has nobody already bought double monocular O.com, aka boobs, aka Ꙭ.com ??
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:14 PM on January 23, 2018

(Good news, I now own Ꙭ.com.)
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:18 PM on January 23, 2018 [28 favorites]

@Eyebrows
Beat me by 2 minutes.
posted by bastionofsanity at 1:23 PM on January 23, 2018

But lowercase Ꙭ is still available!
posted by Eyebrows McGee at 1:39 PM on January 23, 2018

Thought about it, but ended up getting:
ꟾ.com
ꟾ.net
posted by bastionofsanity at 1:49 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

So as a collector of domain names, what will you peeps do with these?
posted by cjorgensen at 2:06 PM on January 23, 2018

My initial thought is to build a simple application for online identity management where the account creation process involves buying me a coffee in person. Recertification required every 6 months to maintain an account in good standing.
posted by bastionofsanity at 2:11 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

A squatter company took my firstnamelastname.com, my username is taken, and I haven't come up with anything else I like. I want a website a little more everyday than pedestrianparking.com (which is expiring, so if anyone wants it, let me know), so I'm keeping an eye out.
posted by aniola at 2:15 PM on January 23, 2018

One approach is to see if there's a country code top-level-domain with the last two letters of your last name, so you get a name like janesmi.th.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 2:27 PM on January 23, 2018

There's not. I've looked into all this before. Once, due to a wordpress.com bug, I thought I could get a.mo for normal website prices, which was pretty exciting but not at all true.

Anyway, I found a character that is my initials! Dot com! Do I get the upper case or lower case?
posted by aniola at 2:33 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

They're the same! Hurray! My new website address is totally going to have hyphens in it.
posted by aniola at 2:36 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Anyone had luck buying one of these via Hover? I think they support IDN registration if you manually do the Punycode conversion yourself. But I'm getting an error when I check out.
posted by Nelson at 3:04 PM on January 23, 2018

The Weird One Character Domain Superstore does the punycode conversion for you if you click through.

Mine was working fine through namecheap (til I got stuck with a blocked debit card because I'm in abroad and the bank knows it, and namecheap probably isn't in nicaragua).
posted by aniola at 3:31 PM on January 23, 2018

TOP 5 PRICE WISE
🤣.ws
ROLLING ON THE FLOOR LAUGHING $50000.00
ž.co
LATIN SMALL LETTER Z WITH CARON $50000.00
👕.ws
T-SHIRT $50000.00
🏨.ws
HOTEL $50000.00
օ.com
ARMENIAN SMALL LETTER OH $50000.00

BOTTOM 5 PRICE WISE
ἀ.xyz
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI $0.99
ἁ.xyz
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA $0.99
ἂ.xyz
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH PSILI AND VARIA $0.99
ἃ.xyz
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND VARIA $0.99
ἇ.xyz
GREEK SMALL LETTER ALPHA WITH DASIA AND PERISPOMENI $0.99
posted by unliteral at 3:50 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Best FAQ ever
posted by yoHighness at 4:21 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ok! It failed at namecheap: IDN Code is Missing, domain: example.com
posted by aniola at 4:27 PM on January 23, 2018 [2 favorites]

Bluehost worked.
posted by aniola at 6:24 PM on January 23, 2018

␀.tk would be a pretty cool domain name.
posted by Foosnark at 6:33 PM on January 23, 2018 [1 favorite]

Ok I could not resist either but I think I broke godaddy with my 𐋀.cc I can't get the administration page to load. Kind of funny how this seems to break a lot of registrars (couldn't get it to work with namecheap, entering punycode or otherwise).
posted by bradbane at 11:47 PM on January 23, 2018

So, now you've got this weird one character domain. You want it to be your personal website. How do you share it? Hyperlink the single character, write out the full puny code address in the physical world? Any tricks for explaining succinctly?

(I am totally going to have to put a shortcut to my special latin character on this and all future keyboards.)
posted by aniola at 8:41 AM on January 24, 2018

I got a useless reply from Hover support. They say the punycode encoding is incorrect and recommend using the exact tool I used to do the encoding. I've verified the encoding is correct. Their site lets you add it to the shopping cart, just the final step of buying fails. If I had to guess I'd say it's because I'm trying to register a Carian letter, which isn't in Unicode Plane 0.
posted by Nelson at 9:21 AM on January 24, 2018

Got another reply back from Hover: "there are some language limitation on our system". Like I said, I suspect it's an extended Unicode problem. I bet some Perl jockey back in 2002 wrote some code that assumes Unicode is a 16 bit charset.
posted by Nelson at 12:46 PM on January 25, 2018

Don't you blame that on Perl. Perl 5.8.0 (the first recommended release for serious Unicode work) was released in 2002. Even if they targeted 5.6 in 2002 they'd have upgraded well past 5.8 by now.
posted by fedward at 1:53 PM on January 25, 2018

OK, OK, some Java jockey then. It definitely had the "Unicode is 16 bits" design flaw, at least at launch.
posted by Nelson at 2:43 PM on January 25, 2018 [1 favorite]

𐊻.games is available in case someone wants to host a SuperQuest remake.
posted by a snickering nuthatch at 10:26 AM on January 29, 2018