Way prefer the design of this to other alternatives...
but SURELY you need to add an emoji Favicon?! DUH!
What makes this better than other alternatives (apart from design)?
Why did you put this together? and why?
@bentossell Thanks for the questions, Ben!
> [how is it different?]
Many sites let you register emoji domains, which is fine if you know exactly what you want. What 😁.to provides is a visual overview of available domains so you can pick and choose.
Generally this approach doesn't work since there's an unlimited number of domains you could possibly register, but when it comes to single-character emoji there's only about 1,500 of which 30% is already taken.
For example I wouldn't have thought of register 👏.to until I saw it was available.
I might add support for other TLDs in the future, but I believe most single-character emoji domains on other TLDs are already taken. There's some exceptions for untrustworthy ccTLDs I wouldn't use myself. (do your own research if you're going to build a business relying on an uncommon ccTLD)
> [why did you make it?]
Max Guerin told me about emoji support in .to domains. He suggested I'd register one, but I wasn't sure which one to get. So I made a script that checked all possible emoji domains. That way I could pick and choose.
After I registered my personal favorites (👋.to, 👏.to, and 🙌.to) I figured I should publicised the list for the rest of the world to benefit from :)
Oh, to those people trying this on Google Chrome, Chrome wouldn't show emoji domains on your address bar. They don't do punycode for displaying UNICODE characters in ASCII. Firefox still does this, has to be enabled at about:config. Search for "punycode" and set that to "true".
@arunsathiya Yeah I think that's a recent change due to security concerns. Some unicode characters look a lot like regular characters so someone could register a domain that looks like paypal.com but is actually something else.
I don't see why regular emoji couldn't be whitelisted though. I expect they will change that at some point.
For what it's wroth, the emoji domains do still work in browsers Chrome. Sites load fine. They just don't show up as visually pleasing.
Shout out to @flarup by the way for his excellent Emoji vector resources (launched on PH yesterday). I used them for the logo and some of the marketing material you see.
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