Carl Mercier’s blog

The Montreal Startup Index for July 2008 is out.  To my amazement, BOTH my startups are in the top 15!

Ajaxwhois (recently acquired) is at #9, and Defensio is at #13.  Oddly enough, Defensio has a lot more traffic than Ajaxwhois.  However, API traffic is not reflected in those rankings and since 99.9% of our traffic comes through our API, Defensio is not scoring as high as it should.

I’m sure our friends from Praized will take the list by storm in the coming months.  Standout Jobs is also scoring pretty high.  Congrats to all!

Stop the press!

My pet project of long date Ajaxwhois.com was recently acquired! The deal has been in the work for quite some time and was finalized last Thursday.

I’m really excited about this since the new owner intends to make the site even better. Unfortunately, I did not have the time to maintain it as much as I wanted lately, being busy with Defensio and stuff. Selling Ajaxwhois made a lot of sense to me at this point: I really want to see the site evolve and I was no longer the guy for that.

I have a secret to share… Before saying my last goodbye to Ajaxwhois, I had to do a little something, right? Well… Before concluding the transaction, I did (yet another) a complete rewrite in Ruby. Ajaxwhois now runs on Thin and Merb! The code is much cleaner and I optimized the algorithms to make everything snappier.

It’s official, Network Solutions is stealing domain names from its customers (proof here and here).   EVERY domain searched for is automatically registered by the company only seconds later.  That’s just one more reason to not trust registrars when you’re looking for the perfect domain name.

If you’re not already aware of that, I’m the author of a nifty little website called Ajaxwhois.  It allows you to lookup any domain name (including .ca, .uk and so on) and to perform whois queries on them.  All of this is, of course, ajaxified to the fullest extent.

The good thing is that Ajaxwhois does NOT send queries to ANY domain registrar and I certainly won’t steal the domain names you search for.