Searching for the ivory tower
05.07.15 · rubyWith so many new TLDs popping up, (.party
, .rocks
, .academy
, .club
, .university
, etc.), it’s getting hard to gauge an organization’s legitimacy.
It’s particularly difficult to determine whether a domain belongs to a real academic institution. Not everyone uses .edu, especially outside the US.
Fortunately, Lee Reilly worked up the Swot Ruby gem, which does exactly that — and more.
Swot verifies educational domains and can return corresponding school names. How does it work? The gem relies on crowd-sourced data to conduct lookups. It’s very accurate and will save you TONS of time.
```ruby require ‘swot’
check emails / domains
Swot::is_academic? ‘[email protected]’ # true Swot::is_academic? ‘[email protected]’ # false Swot::is_academic? ‘stern.nyu.edu’ # true Swot::is_academic? ‘http://nealshyam.com’ # false
look up school name
Swot::school_name ‘[email protected]’ # Carnegie Mellon University
Swot::school_name ‘choate.edu’ # Returns blank, because Choate is a high school. ```
If Ruby isn’t your bag, there are ports for PHP, JavaScript, and Clojure.