A Quick DNS Tool

Whois QuickCheck: Chrome Store | GitHub

Useful for me

I just published my first Chrome Extension. It is a very simple, single-purpose tool that shows some public DNS information for the site you’re on. One of my primary job duties is to ensure smooth website launches, and to work with project managers to quickly troubleshoot launches that run into hurdles. Very often, clients have mistyped a CNAME record or pointed their domain to an incorrect IP address.

With two clicks, I can check these settings (at least, the most common problems). It doesn’t replace DIG, but means I don’t have to open the terminal, or load a DNS search page, quite as often.

The files are available on my GitHub, and it is published for direct install from the Chrome Store.

How it works

The interface is a single HTML button inside of a div, styled with a few lines of CSS. Clicking the button calls a javascript function stored in the popup.js file, which parses your URL into its domain.

A regular expression removes the URL scheme and www subdomain (if applicable), then another regex removes anything after the domain, by finding the first forward slash and anything after it. Pretty simple stuff.

Future features

School is starting again this week, so this will likely sit on the back burner for a bit, but I’d like to add a couple small features.

  • Second button with an alternate search, probably a nameserver check.
  • Customizable settings, like automatically include www, or exclude any subdomain

If you find this useful, let me know in the comments. What other features would like to see?

Prima facie

This is a personal blog, nothing all that special or specific. Here you’ll find things that I have been working on in school, watching in some free time, thinking about while I fall asleep.

No big reason, other than that I’d like to share things with friends and family, and strangers too. I want a creative outlet that offers a bit more flexibility than modern social media, and that doesn’t make me feel so beholden to algorithms and trending audio. My 10 Favorite Episodes of Batman: The Animated Series (and the Three Worst); I Used the Spotify API to Make an Applet; Here’s What I Learned About Databases in School Today. Not all that friendly to Reels or the Metaverse.

A Bit About Me:

I spent most of my twenties as a serial hobbyist, jumping around between photography, screen printing t-shirts, woodworking… and I’m still somewhere in that, but I decided to find something central and long-term, and settled on computer science. I love the potential for creativity, the analytical requirements, the constant state of learning and synthesizing new concepts. I did some self-paced study and landed an entry level (temp-to-hire!) job at a local tech company. I liked it, and I wanted more. So I’ve started working on a degree from Oregon State University’s College of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science.

A portrait of the author, who wears glasses and a beard.
with my winter beard on

This is, in some ways, a return to a childhood vision of my future, albeit without the naivety of a 12 year old building levels in Duke Nukem 3D. As a boy in the ’90s, I learned enough HTML to make a GeoCities website, then learned enough TI-Basic to make silly text-based calculator games. I spent a long time exploring other things (like a bachelor’s degree in music production), but I’m back.

I still have a multimeter and soldering iron, a collection of film cameras, a pizza stone, and a love of audio, and I’ll write about those sorts of things too. Like I said, this isn’t supposed to fit into a box; it’s a place where I can share some things I want to share.