Now that Halloween is over, we embark on the two month journey through the American holiday season. I love the holidays; it’s all togetherness and helping others and giving thanks from here.

In that spirit, I got to thinking about all the ways we’ve been working to make OpenDNS easier for you and yours to use. OpenDNS is really a service every network should be running, regardless of how large or small your network is. So this goodiebag of helpful tools has something for everyone — from households to schools to large, global enterprises. We’ll keep thinking up more ways to make OpenDNS better, but as always, if you have suggestions I encourage you to submit them at Idea Bank, post to the Forums or email me directly at allison at opendns dot com.

1. A brand new video tutorial. This is a biggie, and something we’ve wanted to do for a long time. OpenDNS is not always the easiest thing to explain. All Internet users relate to the frustration of unreliable Internet and slow page-load times, and see the value of free Web content filtering. When we say OpenDNS is a service that’ll make your Internet safer, faster, smarter and more reliable, free, everyone wants it. But the setting up part — the finding your DNS settings and swapping your ISP’s IP addresses for OpenDNS’s — sometimes presents a challenge. The video tutorial walks you through the entire process in under 5 minutes.

2. Schedule a Demo // Request References services. This one is not new, necessarily, but since we’ve never really called your attention to it, I figured now’s as good a time as any. The Schedule a Demo and Request References were really designed with larger organizations in mind. We’ve learned that when you guys make a decision about using a new technology on your network, there are often lots of different folks involved in the decision making process. Sometimes there’s even paperwork that needs to be filled out, and calls that need to be made to existing, happy users of the service in question. Scheduling a demo couldn’t be easier. Just tell us a bit about you and your organization to prepare the OpenDNS rep who’ll do the demoing. Invite coworkers and get all of your questions answered on one snappy call. Same thing for requesting references. We’ll match you with an organization that’s similiar to yours. Have you seen how many happy customers we have?

3. Expanded router selection. We’re always working to keep our selection of routers in the instructions updated, but recently we went big and added several. Today we offer instructions for 16 different router manufacturers from the well-known Linksys, NETGEAR and D-Links to some more rare models. The goal is to have every router represented, to make it as easy as possible for everyone to set up OpenDNS, so look for us to continue adding to our gallery.

Happy holidays, everyone.

OpenDNS is a great complement to existing network set-ups. Hearing that others think the same is even better.

Simple DNS Plus is a Windows DNS server for hosting and managing your own domains, among other tasks. In response to customer requests, Jesper G. Hoy at JH Software created instructions for Simple DNS Plus customers interested in using OpenDNS for their external requests.

Thanks to Jesper for permission to share these instructions on our site, as part of our forwarding instructions.

The famous quote about defining pornography is “I know it when I see it,” from a 1964 Supreme Court case. I’m glad we’re working with St. Bernard Software to get human-reviewed categorization of adult sites for our adult site blocking service.

At home, I’m the network administrator. While testing adult site blocking, I learned that you need to be careful what you block. My wife alerted (ahem) me to my overzealous blocking. For the interested, TMZ.com is classified as both lingerie/bikini and adult themes. I cannot disagree… but it’s still a fun celebrity gossip site. It’s no longer blocked on my network, though other categories are.

That kind of control is useful, and it’s why we offer 6 categories, so you can make the right choices for your network.

Avoid making my domestic misstep. Check a site to find out whether it would be blocked, and why.

Thanks to Seg for helping us put together instructions for setting the Nintendo Wii to use OpenDNS.

Whether you’ve had DNS issues with your Wii in the past and need something more reliable, or you just want to speed up performance and safeguard against future outages, switching to OpenDNS will do the trick.

Note: if your console is connected to the Internet via WiFi router, we’d recommend changing the settings on your router instead of the Wii itself.

Like the rest of the world, we noted with interest the announcement of the iPhone at yesterday’s Macworld keynote.

By “noted with interest” I really mean “we all are crushed it’s not available yet.”

As soon as the device is available in the wild, we’ll write instructions about how to switch the DNS settings to OpenDNS nameservers. In fact, I’ve selflessly (?) volunteered to purchase the device for the sole (ahem) purpose of writing these instructions.

Would this count as a “business” expense?!?