my examined life

I’ve been using OpenDNS for almost two years now, and I’m a big fan of their service. Their DNS look-ups are quick which can make web surfing noticeably faster, but what really sold me was the free content filtering. I used to run my own proxy server using DansGuardian for web filtering, and while DansGuardian is a awesome web filter I decided that I didn’t want the noise, power consumption, and maintenance of an additional computer in my house, and OpenDNS fills that void nicely.

Their content filtering is top notch, and customizable with over 50 filter categories and whitelist/blacklist capabilities. They offer typo correction for the most common sites, which means that if you type www.google.cmo in your brower’s url bar you’ll end up at www.google.com which can be handy for those fat finger days. For other mistyped URLs they send you to their OpenDNS Guide which is a google-like search results page to help find the correct site, coincidentally the ads displayed on the OpenDNS Guide pages are how they pay for the service. You can also add images and custom messages to the blocked pages to personalize, and maybe have a little fun with those boring blocked pages. But, best of all the service is free which you can’t beat in today’s economic climate.

If any of this sounds remotly interesting, take a look at their use OpenDNS page to get started, you won’t be disappointed.