Melinda & Cristiano

I saw so many people at BarCampLondon2 with their own Moo Cards that I decided to ditch my old business cards and get some myself. I really loved the idea of personalizing your cards, and not having 250 cards with the same design. So I ordered 100 (minimum) with some of the nicer images in my Flickr feed.

Now, I learned a wise lesson with my last business cards that made it very worthwhile to buy only 100 this time for the same price (19.99 euro) as the 250 I bought before. The whole idea of buying a lot of identical business cards is just ridiculous unless you are a sales person. For the rest of us fewer is better because we are (A) not popular enough that we would be going to run out of them soon and (B) if we will, we are probably popular enough that the important people manage to find you without.

Now if you think you would eventually definitely run out of the cards, it is still good to only buy a few. I, for example, ordered 250 a while back, on which most of the information is now outdated due to my move to the UK. Buying less cards makes it easy to update your information and maybe once in a while choose a fresh design.

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I had some really serious trouble with my old server (which is still in the Netherlands managed by an ex-housemate) so Alper offered me some space on his DreamHost account. Tonight I managed to move the files but somehow I have some issues with the OpenID login for users. So for now no OpenID login, because I need my sleep.

Update: OpenID “should” work again.

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Upgraded to Wordpress 2.1.2 because of some stupid security flaw in the 2.1.1. Although Wordpress integrated into my website has its advantages, static pages have the advantage of not having to upgrade the damn framework that runs your blog. Well, all and all everything should work again (including all the version dependet plugins).

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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.

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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.

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