Searching for the ivory tower

With 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.