Create dynamic landing page to support invitations to "fork" any gov page (wildcard DNS)

[patcon]

Pretend that I want to quickly suggest to someone that they could "fork" https://competitionbureau.gc.ca/ or https://space.canada.ca to a g0v domain managed via this repo.

I could tweet them:

• a link to a g0v.tw explainer website (to explain the movement), and
• maybe the docs to this repo (to explain how it works), and then maybe also
• the real website (e.g., competitionbureau.gc.ca) and
• the non-existent proposed one (e.g., competitionbureau.g0v.ca).

But all of that is confusing and hard to fit in a tweet.

It would maybe be neat if I could instead just link the person to any not-yet-created g0v subdomain http://competitionbureau.g0v.ca, and have a simple splash page explain all of this :)

Proposal

To do this, could set up a small app to sit behind a wildcard DNS record, and "catch" any subdomains that haven't had a record specifically created. In theory, this could walk people through all of:

• what is the g0v movement and where did it start?
• what does "fork the government" mean here?
• how do they request use of this subdomain via this repo?
  • since we can pull the domain name (competitionbureau.g0v.ca) out of the browser url, we could even point them directly to creating the file on GitHub, e.g., click here for example. helper app.

Thoughts? Could this be helpful for other g0v nobodies?

[patcon]

Stub repo: https://github.com/g0v-network/g0v-wildcard

Seems this will be possible with vercel now:
https://vercel.com/docs/custom-domains#wildcard-domains
https://vercel.com/blog/wildcard-domains