One Web Day is a day in which people around the world make an effort to celebrate the internet, its use in every day life, and raise awareness of its value. The OpenDNS crew spent One Web Day 2008 by volunteering our time in helping Meraki and the city of San Francisco install free wireless internet here in the city. Meraki is leading the way in creating free city-wide wireless internet access in San Francisco, allowing anyone in range of their wireless network known as “Free the Net” to surf the web. Not only do they pride themselves on providing the city with free internet, they are also giving back to the low-income community by providing those people with a free alternative.

Together the volunteers installed wireless access points in more 6 buildings around the Tenderloin district that will give over 1,000 low-income San Franciscans access to the internet. Most of the equipment we installed consists of small repeaters mounted to walls near power sources. Each building has one or two main access points that provide internet access, and these repeaters allow Meraki to spread that signal through many levels of the buildings and even from building to building.

It was great to get the team out of the office and do something really good for the community. We got to meet a lot of amazing people at Meraki and other volunteers who were just as excited to be part of such an awesome movement. I know I can speak for the entire team in saying that we all had a lot of fun yesterday and got a lot more out of the experience than we expected. Both myself and the rest of OpenDNS look forward to taking part in future events like this one!

On behalf of everyone at OpenDNS I’d like to thank Mike McCarthy of the San Francisco Department of Telecommunications and Information Services for helping organize San Francisco’s celebration of One Web Day 2008.

Richard, MikeD and I went down to Yahoo this past Friday to participate in their second Hack Day event. Yahoo opens their campus to outside developers on Hack Day for a 36-hour stretch of coding, technical talks, music and fun. It was an amazing event attended by hundreds of developers that banded together to produce 47 hacks by Saturday afternoon. There was even a live performance by Girl Talk on Friday night. I didn’t stay overnight to hack like MikeD and Richard did (more on their awesome hacks in a moment), but I left Friday evening feeling more excited about what Yahoo is doing than I’ve ever felt before.

As many of you know, we work closely with Yahoo to deliver the best search results and ads possible on the OpenDNS Guide. As a company focused on helping people navigate the Internet, we felt strongly early on that it would make no sense for us to build a search service ourselves. Partnering with Yahoo for our search and advertising has been a great move. The quality of the Yahoo Developer Network Search API has has continued to impress and now we’re excited to get involved with the next iteration: Yahoo Search BOSS.

BOSS is the future of Yahoo’s search API, allowing developers to manipulate the results and Yahoo’s index directly. MikeD converted our existing Guide from a PHP application that proxied results from YDN Search to a static Guide that speaks to BOSS directly from your browser. By the early morning hours and thanks in part to the YUI JavaScript library, MikeD had built a prototype of our new Guide.

MikeD was able to get Richard to help with the HTML and CSS before presenting his hack to all the judges and developers. Their hard work paid off and MikeD came away with three awards from the competition! He won the Yahoo BOSS award, third place from the YUI group and the overall Bleeding Purple Award for the hack that screamed “Yahoo!” the loudest (figuratively). For those who don’t know, purple is Yahoo’s color of choice. Richard also made a sweet hack creating a geotagging extension to the Flickr Uploadr (which he also wrote) called Dopploadr that uses data from Dopplr to automatically geotag your photos that are uploaded via the Flickr Uploadr.

I’m proud of what these guys accomplished and I’m excited about what Yahoo is doing. We’ll be working on rolling out MikeD’s new code over the coming weeks as we get various issues sorted out and the “OK” from Yahoo to switch all our traffic over. Hack Day was a fantastic event and I’m glad I was able to be there. I should also mention that if you want to join our team, we’re currently hiring great engineers.

We’ve launched a new design for our website! This new design maintains our classic look and feel while making it much easier for new (and existing) customers to find the information they are looking for.

Since we launched OpenDNS over two years ago we’ve learned a lot from our users. That’s largely because it’s no secret that we’re huge fans of feedback. There are two pieces of feedback about our website that we receive most often.

1. People love the signature OpenDNS look and feel. We consistently hear this bit of positive feedback from our customers and our friends at other Internet companies. We knew that as our website matured we had to keep it true to its roots.
2. People say they find our message to be a bit confusing. This is because our service appeals equally to parents at home as it does to network administrators at large companies. We’re too technical for the parents who want a safer Internet — and we aren’t technical enough for the IT guy who wants to know how it works.

To fix this we realized that we need to talk differently to our different audiences. This seemed unintuitive to us at first, but over time it began to make sense. While our service is the same for everyone, the benefits of OpenDNS are different to different people. Our goals for this new site were to better recognize the different audiences who use OpenDNS and explain our benefits to them more clearly without losing the simplicity of our old site.

We hope you will browse around and let us know what you think.

PS: There is a ton of new copy, so if you find any typos or grammar mistakes please tell us about them and we’ll send out some t-shirts to our best copy editors. I’m looking at you, mom.