This morning we enabled time zone preferences in your OpenDNS account, allowing you to set your account to use your local time zone. This is significant because until now, all of your stats appeared in Pacific Standard Time (PST). The enhancement affects all charts, graphs and logs in your OpenDNS account, including but not limited to timestamps on malware alerts and DNS stats — which makes data like Top Domains and Blocked Domains much more useful.

Here’s how the change came about: Three separate people submitted the idea to IdeaBank, the area in the OpenDNS community where anyone can suggest new feature and service enhancement ideas. Then 1,160 other people voted up the idea, indicating that they’d also like to see it come to fruition. As a company, everyone pays attention to IdeaBank and we took note of the mounting support for the idea. Because you told us you wanted it, we decided to build it into the service.

If you have ideas for other features and enhancements you’d like to see, I encourage you to speak up and let us know. Or take a stroll through IdeaBank and vote on other people’s ideas that you think are great. This is how the system works, and how we’re able to focus on building those features that we know you want.

If you want to enable time zone preferences in your account, go to the My Account tab in your dashboard and choose “edit account info.” Select your region of the world, followed by the closest major city. The change will take effect immediately. Kudos to OpenDNS Engineer Cory Krug for making this happen.

For a good part of yesterday Germany was unreachable on the Internet. 13.6 million sites with domains ending in .de, the top level domain used by the country, wouldn’t load. And email being sent to addresses at these domains was returned as undeliverable.

The problem happened when DENIC, the German Internet authority, uploaded new zone files that contained only partial data. But my goal is not to call attention to the cause, rather a potential solution.

Last year we introduced SmartCache, an OpenDNS invention and one of the most significant innovations the DNS has seen in its 25+ years. SmartCache works by automatically locating the last-known good IP address for websites that aren’t loading and can help in many cases where sites are unreachable, however temporarily.

While the nature of this particular issue would not have been entirely resolved by SmartCache, there are many others – that have taken millions of sites offline – that could be completely fixed for our users by our technology. SmartCache is available to all users free, but you have to enable it for your network. It’s a simple checkbox in Advanced Settings in your account. We purposely didn’t enable it across the board, because like everything we do, we wanted it to be your choice. After yesterday’s issue and a handful of others, however, we think maybe it should be on by default. We’re curious to hear your thoughts: does SmartCache provide enough value to warrant enabling it automatically for all of our users and making it a core OpenDNS feature?

I’ve been a bit quiet lately (look for that to change effective immediately), but I can assure you that our engineering team is working hard building new features that will make your Internet even safer, faster, smarter and more reliable than it is today. Stay tuned for more details, and in the meantime, let us know what you want us to build.

Just a reminder that we’re hosting a webinar tomorrow on the benefits of easily deploying OpenDNS in environments with multiple sites — like school districts, retail stores, restaurant chains and kiosks — and also for currently-unprotected remote/branch offices. Tens of thousand of organizations use OpenDNS this way today and claim 100% satisfaction with the ease of set-up and quality of service.

In the webinar, we’ll discuss how easy it is to deploy OpenDNS remotely, and manage network settings and Web content filtering preferences from our online interface. OpenDNS doesn’t require any appliances, so you can be up and running across multiple sites in minutes. Learn this and more during our short 30-minute webinar tomorrow.

Date: Tomorrow – Wednesday, May 12

Time: 11 AM PDT – 11:30 AM PDT

Sign up here, and don’t forget to invite your colleagues!