The PuntuEUS Foundation has developed two Internet services: labur.eus and whois.eus
- Labur.eus, a URL shortener in Basque, and whois.eus, a domain consultation tool, are the only ones of this type available in Basque.
- The .EUS domain will be 2 years old on 3 December and will be celebrating its birthday with a special offer: during this period a domain name can be obtained for 9.95 euros.
The mission of the PuntuEUS Foundation is to make Basque visible, usable and useful in the digital environment. That is why since it was set up it has made available to the public more than one project designed to promote Basque in the digital environment, such as PuntuEUS Behatokia, Sarean.eus and Basque-language Internet Day. Another two services will be made available on the Internet coinciding with its second birthday on 3 December: Labur.eus and Whois.eus. Furthermore, these two services have been developed in open code, and the code is available for anyone who is interested.
What is unique about these projects developed by PuntuEUS and which will be made available on Basque-language Internet Day is the fact that they are in Basque. Today, all the tools available over the internet are in another language (mostly in English) and have been developed abroad.
This is a service in Basque to shorten links. It will enable long URLs to be turned into short, simple addresses and also for these addresses to be personalised. This tool makes long, difficult addresses easy to remember. It also offers the chance to consult the history of short URLs developed by users.
This service used to be provided by ttiki.com but the website has closed down. Labur.eus is a project developed by the PuntuEUS Foundation in collaboration with Dinahosting; it is based on Polr 2 and has a GNU GPL licence.
Whois.eus is the WHOIS public service in Basque, a tool for obtaining information about websites or domain names. This tool will enable the user to see the information used in the registration of domain names and its obtainability. For those who lack technical knowledge it provides an opportunity to search for information linked to a domain name and also to find out whether the domain name in question is free or not. This service enables the user to search not only the .EUS domains but also the major TLD domains (.com, .net, .org, etc.) and translates the information into Basque.
From a technological perspective, on the other hand, the Whois.eus website is a groundbreaker because it displays the information obtained through the WHOIS consultations in a structured way. The fact is that the tools developed until now display the results using a long text which makes it difficult to interpret the information. What is more, unlike other WHOIS search tools, this website is able to display information about .EUS domain names.
The bootstrap framework used to develop Whois.eus is open-code, so anyone can take the source code and use it in his/her own projects by making changes to the code if necessary. A large development community involved in the project is there to provide help in this respect.
The .EUS domain has been available for 2 years now, and in these two years 6,100 companies, institutions and individuals have joined the community by registering domain names. Right now, .EUS is the fastest growing domain in the Basque Country and the only one in the Peninsular Basque Country that is seeing growth.
The PuntuEUS Foundation manages the .EUS domain and is responsible for managing, monitoring and administering the domain. But that is not its only task. It is working to turn Basque into a top-level language in the digital environment.