Show HN: Vanity Domain Generator

2 points by i3oi3 7 days ago · 1 comment · 2 min read

When each of my kids got to the age that they started using email and having an online presence, I got them their own vanity domain by going to a "fake word generator" and then taking the best-looking fake words and doing a registrar search for it.

With my youngest son starting the process, I thought "I'll save time going back and forth and integrate the process. Surely it can't be that hard." Making it happen was easy. Making it something I would share was harder.

It's implemented as a single-page app at https://vanitydomain.net, with all of the logic on the client side. It takes the top 10k words in your language's Wikipedia, and builds a Markov trigram model to make a plausable-ish word. I tried more clever things, but they were all worse.

For each plausible word, it hits Cloudflare's DNS (super cheap, fast, and scalable) as a low-pass filter, then checks the definitive RDAP server if it's available. It displays the words that passed both and gives you a link to register it (not monetized; it's all good).

If you know someone who might benefit from having a vanity domain with a hosting site, infinite email addresses, and control of their own online presence, this might be a fun starting point.

Let me know if there are things that could make it better, or if you know of a better model for word generation. It's my fun-time project that might be a blessing to other people, so feel free to push it in a good direction.