billso.com

I do like using OpenDNS.

Protection from phishing sites, the ability to whitelist or blacklist specific URLs, community tagged categories… and it’s free.

It only takes a few minutes to change your computer’s domain name settings to the OpenDNS servers, as long as you have administrative rights on your computer. Just read the OpenDNS tutorial and make the appropriate choices. Be sure to reboot or restart your computer after confirming the changes.

Your Internet connection might become faster, too.

Related posts and pages on billso.com

• 25 July 2008: Fixing the DNS security hole with OpenDNS
• 24 February 2008: Pakistan blocks YouTube, breaks trust
• 15 January 2008: OpenDNS update
• 3 September 2007: When users block the ads, should web sites block the users?
• 13 July 2007: Speed up your broadband connection with OpenDNS

Firefox, my favorite web browser, will finally release version 3 on Tuesday, 17 June 2008.

If you already use Firefox, this new version should fix the memory leak issue that happens when you open up too many tabs. Add-ons are much easier to find, install and manage, too. 

If you don’t use Firefox, try it! It’s a free web browser that is faster and safer than Safari or Internet Explorer.

See these pages for more details:

• Spread Firefox
• Mozilla Party Central
• LifeHacker’s top 10 new features in Firefox 3.0

Universal Music Group has announced its deal with Qtrax for free music downloads. See these reports from the Associated Press and Engadget. UMG is the first of the major recording labels to reach such an accord.

Back on 27 January 2008, I published a billso.com story about the Qtrax free music download service. Qtrax intends to earn advertising revenue from its P2P web site and software.

Of course, Qtrax hasn’t released any Mac software yet. There’s a beta version available for Windows users. The Qtrax browser is based on Mozilla, and it sounds vaguely like Flock.

Sometimes it takes a few months to work out all the pesky details.

I rarely see the New York Times mention a Firefox extension, but it happened Sunday. John Markoff wrote an article about PicLens, a browser plugin developed by CoolIris. Browser extensions are small programs, written by third-party developers, that add or extend features in the web browser. Developers use an application programming interface (API) that includes hooks or connections to various browser features. Firefox has the broadest range of extensions available, but Safari and Internet Explorer each support their own families of extensions.

PicLens lets a web site take over the entire computer screen, displaying a seamless interactive slideshow of images from a specific web site. The user interface is minimal, and tucked away on the edges of the screen. Users move around the screen with the direction keys, or by grabbing and throwing the display with the mouse. Click or highlight a photo, and it zooms to full screen.

The experience resembles the CoverFlow interface on the iPod Touch, iPhone and the new Mac operating system, Leopard. The web version is as fast as any disk-based image viewing program I’ve used, and its a fine demonstration of how user interfaces are already changing.

“I’ve wondered for a long time why the computer interface hasn’t changed from 20 years ago,” said Austin Shoemaker, a former Apple Computer software engineer and now chief technology officer of Cooliris. “People should think of a computer interface less as a tool and more as a extension of themselves or as extension of their mind.”

Extension software is an important part of these changes. Users can customize their computer by adding highly specific features. The original browser software is still available, but the user experience becomes more personal and possibly more productive.

The PicLens browser plugin works with a small set of web sites: Facebook, Flickr, Picasa, Yahoo, Friendster, and a few others. Web publishers have to add code to their site that lets PicLens download a gallery of images. Blog and site publishers can add a server-side package to enable PicLens support on their web sites. WeSeePeople has an excellent discussion of how users might benefit from the extension.

PicLens has a demonstration site that uses WordPress, the same software that powers my blog. I am experimenting with PicLens as a PowerPoint slide viewer, but I haven’t posted any demos to my blog yet. PicLens doesn’t support audio or text notes, which are two helpful PowerPoint features.

Tomorrow, I’ll post a broader discussion of widgets, the general family of software that includes extensions.

Download and install PicLens for free for the following browsers:

• Internet Explorer
• Safari
• Firefox (also see the Firefox extension library)

This site is now available in a mobile web format at http://m.billso.com/ – please give it a try with your mobile phone or PDA.

Apple iPhone users can view this site in its regular desktop mode at billso.com, or try the mobile version.

As I mentioned on 27 November 2007, the mobile web is not quite ready for the masses yet. There is no standard URL for mobile web sites, for example. Some sites like Facebook use “m.” as a subdomain that serves up a mobile site. Other mobile sites are using the .mobi top level domain. I have a short list of mobile web sites at http://billso.com/mobile/

I own http://billso.mobi and I’ve set that name to redirect to http://m.billso.com

It’s difficult to design web sites that resolve well on small screens, especially given the number of different devices, platforms and carriers that exist in the mobile Internet market.

Difficult does not mean impossible

I’ve tweaked my web site with some WordPress plug-ins. Plug-ins are prepackaged files of PHP programming code that third-parties have written to extend the WordPress blog software. I’ve made m.billso.com work on several hundred pages of content with 3 hours of effort.

The mobile version does load quickly on PDAs and phones, while preserving most of the site content. Those were my primary goals. I’m pleased with what I’ve accomplished using free software and web services.

Feel free to log on with a real computer and leave a comment about the mobile site. I’d like to know if the mobile version of this site is usable and useful for my readers.

A few of the site’s features do not work well on the mobile version. I’m looking for workarounds to address some of these problems.

1. The menu on the top of each page becomes a long set of entries.
2. The event calendar in the right sidebar turns into a single column of text, for example. This happens with the standard WordPress calendar widget, too.
3. Tables do not resolve well in mobile browsers, either. That’s one reason that the calendars on the Spring 2008 course pages are written in a boring text format.
4. The scenic image at the top of each page shrinks a bit.
5. Mobile users cannot enter comments. The reCAPTCHA plugin that I use to stop comment spam does not support mobile web browsers. The comment fields will appear on the mobile site, but comments will not be posted. i’ve seen very few mobile blogs that support comment entry, so I am not very worried about fixing this issue.