When you see something new being lauded by Matt Mullenweg (of WordPress fame), Kevin Burton (of TailRank) and Chris Pirillo (of GnomeDex fame) you sit up and take notice.
In this case they are talking up a new service called OpenDNS. OpenDNS is a very simple idea - it is a centralised series of DNS servers which protect you against phishing sites and speed up your browsing.
How do you use the service? Simply change the DNS settings in your computer (or router) to point at OpenDNSs DNS servers (208.67.220.220 and 208.67.220.222) and off you go!
They claim to be much faster by enabling huge DNS caches (does this mean changes to a sites DNS settings will propagate more slowly?) and by having their caches “at the major intersections of the Internet” - so far U.S. only.
They also claim to protect you against phishing by comparing sites you want to visit against their database of known phishing attacks. This strikes me as a dubious claim as these sites change daily and keeping up with phishing sites is a fast paced game of leapfrog. Marshal Kirkpatrick is equally skeptical (if not more so!).
The speed difference of using the OpenDNS servers isn’t especially obvious for anyone based in Ireland. Browsing to any of my regular sites is in fact, initially, a little slower then normal (most are not in their cache yet I suspect) but speeds up on second load.
However, one place I did notice a definite speed bump was in my RSS reader. Chris Pirillo mentioned it in passing when he said:
If you use a news aggregator, either one (or both) of these solutions is mandatory
He was correct. Browsing websites might not seem much faster but my NetNewsWire RSS reader refreshed my >200 feeds in a fraction of the time it normally takes. Maybe this is how they should be promoting their service. Anyone else notice this?
WordPress have announced that version 2.03 has been released. This version contains
- Small performance enhancements
- Movable Type / Typepad importer fix
- Enclosure (podcasting) fix
- The aforementioned security enhancements (nonces)
I updated this blog a few minutes ago and all seems well! The update was straightforward enough - ftp into the site, delete old files, upload new files, sweat as you remember you should have backed up before you started, and test the site!
The update is available for download here.
If anyone notices any strangeness (over and above the usual) in the site, leave a comment or mail me (tom@tomrafteryit.net).
I had a couple of hosting issues a week or so ago which got me to thinking (worrying!) about backing up the content of this blog.
Fortunately WordPress 2.x ships with a backup plugin builtin.
Unfortunately, I had failed to get the plugin to work previously and hadn’t persevered. Now, I decided, was the time to fix that before I have any problems again!!! The fix was easy enough, all I had to do was change the permissions on the backup directory to 777 and the backup worked.
The issue I had now was that the backup plugin is manual - you have to remember to go to Manage -> Backup and click the Backup button to do a backup. I’m not disciplined enough to remember to do that every day.
Fortunately, there is a WordPress plugin called WP-Cron which comes to the rescue here. It is extremely basic but when activated on the Plugins page, it adds the following options to your Backup screen.
With WP-Cron you can schedule your backup to occur nightly at midnight and have the backup emailed to you at an address of your choosing. Sure, there are lots of other bells and whistles it could have, but for me right now, the ability to get a nightly backup of my blogs is extremely re-assuring.
If you are not familiar with the notion of a digital identity, I would recommend you take a few minutes to listen to the podcast I did with Drummond Reed over on PodLeaders a couple of months back.
Drummond is the founder and CTO of Seattle-based Cordance and in the podcast, Drummond explained very clearly the thinking behind and the importance of digital identities.
The lack of a digital identity infrastruture is something which has always annoyed me. Why do I have to kep track of a different username and password for every site I create an account on? Why can’t I have a single sign-on which I control, which allows me access to every site?
Well, today VeriSign made the first significant step towards that goal with the launch of their Personal Identity Provider (PIP).
With a (free) PIP from VeriSign, you get a personal uri for your identity (mine is TomRaftery.pip.verisignlabs.com). You submit this address to logon to websites in place of the usual username and password and the sites get only the identity information you chose to share with them from that address. Sweet.
Now all we need is for websites to adopt this standard and I can forget all the usernames and passwords I have to remember currently!
I can see a time in the very near future when I will use the availability of this as the deciding factor in whether or not I use an online application.
As an aside, I wonder how long it will be before there is a WordPress plugin available which will allow bloggers deploy this for commenters on their blogs? Or if WordPress have any plans to build it into the core of the next WordPress release? Matt?
The latest version of WordPress - WordPress 2.0 was released this evening - head on over to the WordPress Download site to get your copy.
Well done to Matt, Donncha, and the rest of the team involved in getting this one out the door.
Major reasons to update to WordPress 2.0? Nice Ajaxy back-end interface (not gone on it myself, the Link window is too slow opening, for instance); Akismet - Matt’s anti-comment spam plug-in is built-in; and there is a built-in backup facility which will backup your blog db and email it to you! Very nifty.
I just published my interview with Matt Mullenweg (founder of WordPress) and Donncha O’Caoimh (lead developer on WordPress.com) on PodLeaders.com.
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