Even more public (sub-)domains
I was surprised and delighted by the pick-up to my little host-finding script this last week, but I had to crank the surprise-and-delight meter up a notch today when Ed Summers messaged me on Mastodon to let me know that he’d done a bunch of cool work polishing and packaging that script. That description is a little generous, too: Really, Ed came in and made a real project out of a pretty thin idea, and I’m very grateful for it.
So now! “public_domains” is live and even available on on PyPi for pip installation, and the new version improves on my idea in a bunch of ways. whois checking, which had been a bit flaky and required a bunch of network connections, is now optional, improved, and has a progress bar. And just today, Ed added the ability to search Project Gutenberg for a title and check for possible hosts in the first matching result. Very fun.
As an aside, keen observers may note that the my previous post on this topic was the first blog post I’d put up here in years. In the meantime, too, I’ve done some behind the scenes work such as moving this site from Wordpress to Jekyll.
I’d already been giving some thought to relaunching this site to catalog my thoughts and work in a place of my own, and that feeling has been deepened as Twitter is under whatever tumult it’s currently facing. I have to say, somebody like Ed coming along and building on a bit like this really feels like the best-case scenario, and a fun throwback to earlier blogging days. We’re back!