For some reason I thought to myself it would be cool to have an emoji URL for my site. So I searched the web to see if anyone had done it before and, sure enough, an app developer named Panic registered
💩.la in 2011. After that, emoji URLs never really picked up steam. There were a few tutorials - none of which worked. Then on February 23rd The Washington Post wrote an
article about Coke's ad campaign in Puerto Rico using Emoji URLs. In response to The Washington Post article Kaleigh Rogers at Motherborad wrote a
post outlining the brief history of emoji URLs and how to register one. The only thing she left out was which registrars allowed non latin character URLs. I tested Go Daddy and Hover neither of which would allow me to register my fancy new emoji URL. Finally after searching the web I found a legit Domain Registrar that would allow the unicode URL: name.com. There may be others but name.com was painless and simple. Finding the Domain Registrar was the most difficult part of the process.
My Fancy new Emoji URL
Here are the steps to getting your own Emoji URL, surprisingly there are a few still out there:
- Go to punycoder.com and generate the unicode that you are going to register.
- The Unicode will be translated by the browser and present the emoji if your device and browser support it.
2. Go to Name.com and search for the unicode string, example "xn--bw8h.tk" and register it.
Done!
