Stc.ky: from idea to reality in about 18 hours.

Yesterday afternoon, I was brainstorming short URLs to use for Gapers Block tweets; I was hoping to use http://g✶b.ws, but the unicode character breaks the URL in most Twitter clients. So, I was idly trying stuff in Domai.nr and came across the .ky TLD. Intrigued, I tested stc.ky and found that it was available (st.ky and stic.ky were not).

After digging a little deeper, though, I discovered that to register a .ky domain, you have to be a resident of the Cayman Islands. Many TLDs allow registrations by non-residents, but not this one. So instead I tweeted the idea:

I figured I’d get no response, like usual, but instead I heard from a user named caymaniac expressing interest. He’s a Cayman citizen who runs a site about the Cayman Islands, and he registered stc.ky — and sti.ky for good measure. We traded a few tweets back and forth about how to create an URL shortener; I suggested he look into LESSN, Shaun Inman’s roll-your-own shortener code. I figured that was it for awhile.

This morning I got a tweet from @caymaniac, letting me know Stc.ky is now live. *

It’s not that pretty yet, as he notes, but it’s functional. Links go in, a shorturl comes out. Pretty sweet. And at least for now, the urls are truly short: they’re created sequentially, so the one I created just now for the The Westin Casuarina Resort & Spa, Grand Cayman is stc.ky/6. You can customize the outcome, too, ICANHAZ-style. Hilarity is sure to ensue.

So there you go — from tweet to thing in about 18 hours. How cool is that?

* I’m a little disappointed to see caymaniac trying to limit its use to Cayman-related links only — hopefully he’ll see the light and find other ways to promote the Cayman Islands with the domain. I did create a couple shorturls before the disclaimer went up — one for Gapers Block (stc.ky/GB) and one for me3dia (stc.ky/me). ↑