Cristiano on Tech/Life

I know that this might be confusing with all my OpenID talk, but I just stumbled on a concept called OpenDNS. The concept is simple that instead of using the official DNS system which is closed property, you would use the open DNS servers of the OpenDNS network.

The advantages are numerous, and I quote from the OpenDNS site:

Why is OpenDNS safer than what I’m using now for DNS?
OpenDNS intercepts phishing attempts. OpenDNS customers will be warned if they attempt to visit a phishing site.

Why is OpenDNS faster than other DNS servces?
Two things make OpenDNS faster than similar services. First, OpenDNS runs a really big, smart cache, so every OpenDNS user benefits from the activities of the broader OpenDNS user base. Second, OpenDNS runs a high-performance network which is geographically distributed (see network map) and serviced by several redundant connections. OpenDNS responds to your query from the nearest location. That means we’re very fast (and extremely reliable, to boot).

Why is OpenDNS smarter?
We fix typos in the URLs you enter whenever we can. For example, if you’re using OpenDNS craigslist.og will lead directly to craigslist.org.
When you try to go to a website that won’t load, instead of a browser error we show you OpenDNS Guide and help you get to where you want to go.

Now my really big question is: can I trust these guys? What is the quality of their service and is it really worth the trouble? Soon I will be getting my proper internet connection here and it might be interesting to set the router to OpenDNS but I would really like to know what others think first.

Want to setup your own openid on your own URL? This is how you can do this using the concept of delegation:

1. Go to MyOpenID and register your OpenID with your username (<ID>).
2. Put the following code in the header of the site that you ACTUALLY want to use as openid (for example http://myname.net):
   
<link rel="openid.server" href="http://www.myopenid.com/server" />
<link rel="openid.delegate" href="http://<ID>.myopenid.com/" />
<meta http-equiv="X-XRDS-Location" content="http://<ID>.myopenid.com/xrds" />

3. Don’t forget to replace <ID> with your own ID, and don’t forget the last line which is really needed for MyOpenID.
4. Now you can login to any ite with your own OpenID (for example http://myname.net)

Why would you do this? My reason is that this way I can simply change OpenID provider by just changing this piece of code. The advantage of this again is that if your real provider quits or proves to be unreliable, you can simply switch and still login at any site with your unique OpenID.

A obvious disadvantage is that your server that you use for this delegation code must be reliable. That is why I am thinking of moving this site to dreamhost.

Haha.nu has a nice serie of photos that could really be inspiration on how to make proper descriptive slides. The photos explain what certain HTML tags stand for in a very nice way.

I am actually so impressed by some of them that I must give you a few more:

 

Thanks to Simon Willison for pointing out this nice bookmarklet for Safari and Firefox that creates a far better interface for browsing Microformats. In contrast to the bookmarklets in my previous post this bookmarklet allows you to browse multiple Microformats in a nice javascript overlay. Combine this with the special stylesheet in Safari to make browsing Microformats very easy.