TL:DR https://stratocumulus.cloud

Top level domains (TLD)

Every so often, I encounter a new top level domain (TLD). TLDs are at the topmost level of domains. A few of the most common are .com, .org, .net and if you are a trendy startup, .io. You can retrieve a full list of TLDs on wikipedia.

Below are some of my favourite TLDs with various subdomains.

• .ninja
  • coding.ninja
  • sneaky.ninja
  • food.ninja
• .rocks
  • exercise.rocks
  • igneous.rocks
  • ilove.rocks
• .life
  • thegood.life
  • theeasy.life
  • simple.life
• .news
  • fake.news
  • real.news
  • thegood.news

When a new TLD comes out, most of the interesting domains are snatched up quite quickly. Sometimes, you can actually bid and pay extra to receive early access. Google did this with .dev domain earlier this year.

.cloud

I discovered this past month that .cloud is a new TLD. I tried checking a few interesting subdomains but all were taken. These included:

• sittingona.cloud
• engineer.cloud
• white.cloud

I eventually tried looking up actual ☁️ types. There are ten major cloud genuses, so I created a quick script to check their availability.

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import whois

clouds = [
    "stratus",
    "stratocumulus",
    "cirrostratus",
    "cirrocumulus",
    "altocumulus",
    "cumulus",
    "cirrus",
    "altostratus",
    "nimbostratus",
    "cumulonimbus"
]

for cloud in clouds:
    domain = f"{cloud}.cloud"
    w = whois.whois(domain)
    availability = "UNAVAILABLE" if w.domain_name else "AVAILABLE"
    print(f"{domain} : {availability} ")

Running this yielded

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$ python3 taken.py 
stratus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
stratocumulus.cloud : AVAILABLE 
cirrostratus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
cirrocumulus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
altocumulus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
cumulus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
cirrus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
altostratus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
nimbostratus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 
cumulonimbus.cloud : UNAVAILABLE 

And that is how I decided to regiser stratocumulus.cloud! A few clicks later on Route53 and I was now the proud owner of stratocumulus.cloud.

I’m in love with Github Pages and how easy it is to create static websites, so I created a placeholder website. See it at https://stratocumulus.cloud

Tidbits about stratocumulus ☁️ s

Here are a few cool tidbits about stratocumulus clouds:

• exist below 2000m [0]
• most frequency cloud type, covering over 20% of tropical oceans [1]
• climate change and the rise of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere can render these clouds extinct [2]
• they have an interesting cloud symbol
• they are not a major source of precipitation but can signal worse weather is coming [3]

Future work

I want to polish off the site and reach out to any experts on stratocumulus clouds to provide input on what should be on the site. It was a fun little project, and made me simple it is to register a domain and create a simple site.

I’d also like to programatically determine a way to determine interesting domain names. One idea is to use ngrams to identify common phrases that would make interesting domain names.