On the 15th August dnsstuff.com went from a free whois (dns* lookup) service to a paid service. This may sound completely trivial but it had some rather profound implications for Quirk’s very own offering to the online professionals of the world – SearchStatus.

SearchStatus provides the functionality to do a whois* lookup on any page, but unfortunately, it also relies on dnsstuff.com to achieve this. Their decision to make it into a paid site left this functionality useless (or so I thought).

After arriving at work with this piece of “unique” knowledge I managed to grab a second of Craig’s (Quirk CTO and SearchStatus developer) precious time and triumphantly shared my knowledge with him. Turns out Craig was not only aware of this problem but had foreseen it and coded a natural fix into the system (boy, did I feel silly!). I quickly implemented the fix (the process was: with Firefox/Mozilla open, go to SearchStatus, click Options, click the external tab and you are given options of whois servers) and was on my merry way – big up Craig!

In the meantime Craig had been receiving many emails from avid SearchStatus supporters notifying him of the problem and as a consequence had coded the necessary change into the system.

Introducing SearchStatus 1.2.1 – the slightly better and still free contribution to the online community. This update is mainly a maintenance update with some small bug fixes and some special changes for those who are, shall we say, pedantic. These include:

• The whois update
• and the renaming of MSN to “MS Live” in the backward links section.

To get a copy of SearchStatus download it here.


** The DNS lookup:

Some basics - DNS stands for “domain name system” and takes a domain (quirk.biz) and identifies the server IP which that domain resides on. This happens continually and for all domains on any network. The whois function simply takes this to the next level by providing a user with all the information that is held about a domain. This includes: who it's registered to, their contact details, their name and server details etc. In South Africa this server (the co.za server) resides on the domain http://co.za and provides domain lookups, registration, updates and many other nifty little functions.