Stephen Groom Taking a shot at becoming a Poker Pro

Using OpenDNS for reliable, feature rich DNS

Yesterday and today I was annoyed to find that some of my domains had disappeared from the face of the earth.  Others that were assigned to the same server were responding normally and the server was up and functioning fine.  At first I thought it must be a problem relating to Godaddy DNS services (they host my DNS) which would pass.  After 12 or so hours, the problem hadn't went away so I looked for another solution.  After a quick google search for alternative DNS solutions I stumbled upon the OpenDNS project.  The goal of OpenDNS is simple:

OpenDNS is a better DNS service. We make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable. It's free, and there's nothing to download.

So I went ahead and switched my DNS IPs to 208.67.222.222 and 208.67.220.220 (if you don't know how to do this post a comment below and I'll reply with a guide ).  Straight away a ping to www.groomi.net showed that the problem was with Virgin Media's crappy DNS servers.

One thing that annoyed me though, was OpenDNS' money-making method.  I mis-typed a web address and was instantly greeted with an ugly search page littered with banners: http://guide.opendns.com/?url=www.qwertyuiop.  This alone was enough to put me off using OpenDNS until I discovered that you can register an account at OpenDNS.com which allows you to disable this feature, track your DNS traffic,  Enable/Disable content filtering + phishing protection and much more.

Since finding this I am very happy with the service that OpenDNS offer and would reccomend it to anyone!

URLshort Finished!

Well I never expected that I'd be posting this today.

My [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URL shortening service[/url] is now completely ready to use. It is not complete in the way that the pages are still very minimal and have no content on them but what is 100% required. I have, however finished all of the backend stuff.

It checks that a URL is valid;
Checks that the URL has not already been shortened, and if it has returns the short URL;
Checks the URL against two blacklists of known malware/phishing sites;
Shortens the URL; and
Gives it to you!

If anyone has any feature suggestions / feedback / bug reports, please post them here as these are the critical stages of the website

Expect more updates tomorrow when I add some more pages and maybe even more features

Thanks
Stephen Groom
[url=http://www.urlshort.com]www.urlshort.com[/url]

URLshort Updates

Hello there,

I have been a busy boy today and as-promised, I have some [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] related updates for you guys. The first thing I did today was put together a little logo image and a little bit of XHTML/CSS to come up with the first layout candidate for the [url=http://www.urlshort.com]URLshort[/url] main page. This is available [url=http://www.urlshort.com/index.html]over at urlshort[/url] for you all to see.

After this, I was pretty bamboozled as to how I was going to create my URL generator. I have been looking at TinyURL scripts' source code for days and none met what I needed. They all seemed to involve some use of a random string generator using rand() or mt_rand(). To me this seemed to waste a good amount of CPU time along with creating huge gaps in URL availability. I decided that I wanted my URLs to start at [b]a[/b], get to [b]9[/b] and then go to [b]aa[/b]. After much trial and error I have coded this with the help of [url=http://lilurl.sourceforge.net/]lilurl[/url] which I had a look at and borrowed it's ideas (but not its code) to make a generator of my own.

I have uploaded a little preview of how URLs will be generated and [url=http://www.urlshort.com/inc/inc.php]here it is[/url]! It shows 10,000 URLs and as you can see, there is no chance of us running out of short URLs with this formula!

Tomorrow I will be adding blacklists and hopefully deploying URLshort for the public so stay tuned!

Thanks
Stephen

My new Domain :)

My friend Andy's domain was set to expire in a few days time, and being as unemployed as he is, couldn't afford to pay the £5 to renew it. I stepped in and offered him access to my Dedi server in turn for his domain . He accepted, but after transferring the domain decided that he couldn't make any use of the dedi so essentially I got a free domain. :thumbs:Thanks andy:thumbs:

So, in the not-so-distant future I am going to be starting a new web project using the (I think quite valuable) domain [b]www.urlshort.com[/b]. I intend it to be a tinyurl type service where you can have www.urlshort.com/123 direct to www.myfreehost.com/server1/users/package1/123/go or w/e. If anyone has any suggestions for features they would like to see from the service, please comment here and I will do my best to implement them.

Cheers
Stephen

Lifehacker – Consolidate Firefox’s Chrome

Hello.

I don't have much to share today. Just a quick reblog of something I found by accident over at lifehacker.com (A blog which I have since subscribed to ) which gives some tips on how to clean up Firefox 3's Chrome to save vertical space

[url=http://lifehacker.com/396863/how-to-consolidate-firefox-3s-chrome]Consolidate Firefox 3's chrome[/url] helped me shave a good 30px or more from my firefox, and taught me some basic manipulation of userChrome.css (Which until now I didn't even know existed).

I also installed a new RSS Reader today called Sage to my firefox which certainly beats the hell out of "Live Bookmarks" . Check out [url=https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/77]Sage[/url]!

I guess while I'm on about firefox I can't help but plug Naresh's [url=http://labs.mozilla.com/2008/08/introducing-ubiquity/]ubiquity[/url] [url=http://enaresh.com/ubiquity]commands[/url] of which I particularly like his php one

Needless to say, I am becoming happier with Firefox and still proudly haven't tried Google Chrome yet :thumbs:

Love
Stephen