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December 3, 2006

雨笙.com

I wanted to play around with IDNs (internationalized domain names, see Wikipedia for a primer). All of the individual words in my name—廖/Liao, 雨/Yu and 笙/Sheng—have already been registered (damn you domain squatters!), so I took 雨笙.com (in punycode form: xn--zvzm38c.com).

Most registrars (including my usual registrar GoDaddy) are not set up to handle IDNs, so I ended up using DomainSite. It sucks that I have to deal with all these different registrars for the domains I own: one for my IDN (DomainSite), one for my .ca domain (BareMetal) and one for everything else (GoDaddy).

Right now, 雨笙.com is configured to redirect here to liaoyusheng.com. I wonder how useful this IDN will prove to be. In verbal situations, I could see this being a better way to tell a Taiwanese person how to reach me on the web. The average Taiwanese is far more likely to remember 雨笙.com than the pinyin liaoyusheng.com since Taiwanese people don't know the pinyin system.

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