We experienced a short outage today as our DNS host temporarily went down. We’ve switched to a new DNS host that has a better reliability record.

We’ve started using pwgen-php to generate passwords. Password generation is now available on the home page and bulk orders.

Please be patient waiting for a reply to your API key request. We have received dozens of key requests and are handling them as quickly as possible.

Thank you for your patience!

We’ve received several requests for a method to easily generate names for an entire family. To satisfy these requests, we’ve created The Sims Family Generator.

Choose how many people you want in your family (1 to 10 family members), what nationality to use, and we instantly generate your family!

Click here and try it out!

We have finally launched our free API. For full details and to apply for an API key, please visit our API page.

A fun use of the Fake Name Generator has been spreading through the blogosphere, and we wanted to make sure all of our visitors had a chance to hear about it.

Step 1 – Author: Get a fake name from the Fake Name Generator.

Step 2 – Title: Get a random verb from the Fake Name Generator verb page.

Step 3 – Cover Art: Search for your random verb at flickrCC.

Step 4 – Putting it Together: Use some photo editing software, like PicMonkey or Photoshop, to throw it all together.

Step 5 – Publish: Put your new book cover on your blog along with these instructions!

Here is our new book cover:

Note: Our cover is a derivative work of Summer Start on Flickr.

The home page of the Fake Name Generator (and selected parts of other pages) is now available in:

• English
• Chinese (Simplified)
• Chinese (Traditional)
• Portuguese
• Spanish
• German

We hired professional translators to help with this so there wouldn’t be any garbled machine translation issues.

Please let us know what you think!

We’ve added the hCard microformat to the Fake Name Generator. All names, addresses, phone numbers, websites, birthdays, and occupations are now properly marked up to be easily utilized by browsers capable of understanding the hCard microformat.

We’ve made a few changes since our last post:

• Licenses – We have added the GPLv3 license as an option for Fake Name Generator identities. This will allow you to include FNG names with GPL licensed software packages. For full information, please view the license page.
• Polish name set – Thanks to the advice of own of our visitors, we have updated the Polish name set to display more accurate names. We have changed name generation to display the correct -ka/-ki inflection in last names.
• Internationalization – We have added limited Chinese and German translations of the home page. We are looking for individuals willing to help us add more accurate language translations.

You may have noticed a few glitches on the website over the past few days. We are working hard on providing translations of the Fake Name Generator, including Chinese, and accidentally introduced a few bugs in the process. We are pretty sure we have them all squashed, but please let us know if you run into any problems.

For a sneak peak of our Chinese page, visit http://zh.fakenamegenerator.com

(Please note that we don’t speak Chinese, so several of our translations are probably less than optimal. If you speak Chinese and can give us some pointers, please shoot us a note. Thanks!)