OpenDNS: Getting Better and Better
I am told I have the distinction of being the first person to blog about the fantastic (and free) service OpenDNS (created by the inimitable David Ulevitch). If you aren’t using OpenDNS, you should be — it will make your Internet browsing faster and more secure.
Tonight I heard about yet another reason to be a fan of OpenDNS: shortcuts. Shortcuts in OpenDNS allow you to, for instance, set your OpenDNS account to send you to the Wall Street Journal web site when you type “wsj” into your browser. You can also set up shortcuts that take an input — for instance, I have the shortcut “domain” set up to check for the availability of any domain (where I type the domain I want to check for after I type “domain”). I have used shortcuts in Saft for a while, but I am often using several different browsers on more than one computer throughout the day, so it’s great to now have this functionality built right into my DNS.
I think the shortcut feature could really be interesting going forward if the OpenDNS folks allow people to expand it to a richer command-line interface ala yubnub because it’s “right there” in your network no matter what browser you are using.