Check the Competition With project-name

While reading through Red Handed, a Ruby blog, I stumbled on to an entry about Akira Tanaka’s CVS repository.

If you like Ruby then it’s well worth spending ten minutes having a look through his projects, while the code does what it’s supposed to some of his little tools are real niche fillers; and project-name is an ideal example.

When run with a single argument project-name goes away and queries a number of different sites, it checks the availability of domain names that consist of the query string and a number of different .tlds, it polls SourceForge, Savannah, the Ruby Application Archive, Freshmeat (but only checking the string against existing projects short names, not the full names!) and does a google count of the term you’re searching on. Ground breaking? Nah, useful? Heck yes.