Holy moly. The response to my Domain Lookup for Firefox tool has been staggering.

The tool hit 1,000+ active users in a little over two weeks thanks to blog writeups, forum threads and StumbleUpon. That’s before I’d had a chance to start any “real” (read: planned and paid-for) marketing.

I’ve had a few dozen emails from users saying they love the tool. A handful have asked about a tip jar. At the moment, all the tool’s downloads are driven by word of mouth recommendation. So instead of a tip, perhaps you’d consider:

• Blogging about the tool
• Sharing it on your favourite social media site
• Sharing it on your favourite geek forum
• Telling your webmaster, SEO and domainer friends
• Adding it to your email signature

If you *really* want to give me something, I have an Amazon Wishlist. Thanks for your kind words and support.

There’ll be an early April auto-update adding new registrars that users have requested (please tell me your if your favourite is MIA). Don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed or email alerts to keep up to date.

PS. If you’ve not yet tried Domain Lookup for Firefox yourself, it takes mere seconds to install and is guaranteed to turn you into a millionaire domainer overnight*.

(* Possibly untrue.)

12/4/2008 update: Domain Lookup now has it’s very own home.

(You can jump straight to the installation once you agree to the user agreement.)

I buy a fair few domains. I’ll be reading, say, David Pogue in the New York Times, see a phrase used in context and wonder if the corresponding domain is available.

This gave me the simple idea for Domain Lookup. The extension lets you perform one click domain searches at your registrar of choice using the selected text in your browser window.

It’s super-simple: select the text for your domain search and hit the keyboard shortcut (CTRL + SHIFT + D by default). Alternatively, you can right click for the contextual menu and hit “Domain Lookup for…”.

The extension will normalize the text, removing spaces and other illegal characters etc, then launch a new tab/window to search for the domain at your favourite registrar.

You can choose your domain registrar on the preferences panel (under Tools > Addons).

At present, the Firefox addon supports these domain name registrars:

You can also set the TLD(s) you wish to search for:

Looking for another domain registrar or TLD? Let me know and I’ll see what I can do.

Installation

If you accept the user agreement, you can go head and install the extension pronto.

If you are unfamiliar with quirks of installing Firefox addons, full instructions follow:

1. Try to install the extension.

2. The latest version of Firefox will warn you…

3. Click ‘Edit Options’ and add QualityNonsense.com to your trusted domains list.

4. Try to install again once you’ve added QualityNonsense.com to your trusted domains.

5. After the three second wait, click ‘Install Now’.

6. Restart Firefox.

Privacy & Legal

The boring-but-important stuff:

1. The extension does not log your domain searches. Your domain data is only used to trigger a lookup at your domain registrar.

2. The extension comes without warranty either expressed or implied. Use of the extension is entirely at your own risk. Neither myself, Richard Kershaw, nor Quality Nonsense Ltd shall be liable for any damages arising directly or indirectly from its use.

3. The extension contacts Tools.QualityNonsense.com every day or so to check for updates to domain registrar data. This means I can add additional domain registrars and TLDs, and fix any problems that arise as registrars change how their sites work.

4. The extension logs anonymous aggregated usage data by default. You can opt out of this in the preferences pane. The only data collected is the number of installations and how often the extension is used.

5. The extension uses affiliate links for some domain registrars.

I take privacy seriously. If you’ve any questions or concerns, please feel free to contact me.

Feedback

Comments, ideas or suggestions? I love them all equally. Specifically, I want to hear:

• Which domain registrars do you want added?
• What TLDs do you want added?
• What could be improved?

Please post feedback in the post comments.

My army of beta testers deserve enormous thanks, particularly Aaron, Rob, Jon, Gareth, Stephen and Fraser. Thank you muchly.

I’ve just installed a new WordPress theme. Bear with me as I iron out the countless CSS glitches…