I've been caught up in a project lately which has left me with little time for blogging. But the dust is settling after the launch of Liberate Domains, and it went great!

The short description: We got burned by a registrar that fed our domain name ideas to a domain squatter, so I wrote a little desktop GUI interface to whois for my boss. I wrote it so that it would avoids the registrars and goes directly to the registries whenever possible. I didn't think much of it at the time, but the next thing I knew, we had a Windows port, a Mac Dashboard Widget (which earned an Apple Staff Pick no less), and I wound up feeling passionate enough about the death-spiral of unethical registrar behavior and cybersquatting that I wrote a white paper about it.

There was a launch event on June 23rd, the 25th anniversary of the first successful test of the domain name system. I had written a simple version of the app in May, but we found out about the DNS anniversary about a month before it was going to happen. It was quite a race to get everything ready in one month. The hardest part was figuring out how we could continue to support it. We decided to go with ads in the GUI interface and on the site, but man was that a headache. The dashboard version just broke as soon as we tried to add iframes, and the Windows version still can't use adwords because of a limitation in the WebBrowser control, the beforeNavigate2 hook doesn't actually get called when it's supposed to, and the control is aware only of html loaded initially, not after javascript rendering, which is how Google's ads are implemented. I'm sure there's a way to get it working, but it seems like the assumption for this control is that everyone is just building a handicapped version of MSIE, not applications that integrate web content without being a web browser specifically. The Mac app was easier in this respect, but just because the hooks worked as advertised.

I couldn't have asked for better press coverage for this. James Pilcher got the scoop and was the first journalist that believed the registrar/cybersquatter unholy alliance is worthy of coverage, and the editors at the paper put the story on the front page of the Enquirer. That just floored me. The day of the release we also got covered on CNBC, the Boston Globe, Forbes that morning, then I lost track in the scramble before the release event. The local Fox affiliate shot a short interview at the event and apparently aired it that night.

We released the LiberateDomains source two days after launch. I think it's the only cross-platform open source GUI whois client at the moment. The app still needs some improvements, and we plan to release an iPhone / iPodTouch version after the new hardware is released next month.

If anyone out there is passionate about stopping domain front-running and cybersquatting, I invite you to help with the project. It's probably going to take some creativity to stay ahead of those guys.