Templates and Twitter

Tomingo and I spent some time tonight updating the template for this blog, and I signed us up with Twitter.

These days, there are many ways to communicate with your followers, so we try to select services that we can easily integrate into other things. We can ride the Atom/RSS feeds to have our blog appear virtually anywhere, and we can use the Twitter API to embed our tweets wherever we like.

For example, using the system we have in mind, we will be able to tweet directly from our web site. That one tweet will go to our Twitter page, anyone following us on Twitter, our blog, Google Buzz, and anyone following us there, other places we havnt thought of yet, and finally back to our own web site as a sidebar item. Neat huh?

That way, we keep the number of places we need to update to a minimum, which helps us keep communication clear and manageable, and our followers can follow us from wherever they like - perhaps even from their phone.

Yahoo Pipes is another invaluable tool for aggregating RSS feeds, and we use that in other projects too.

The web site is coming along. Hopefully we will have something that we can show soon.

About AussieDNS

What is it?

Well, basically its yet another public DNS site where people can create and host their own primary or secondary DNS zones, along with other features like URL and email forwarding, all the usual DNS stuff, and tools.

Some might ask Why? There are hundreds of domains registered relating to DNS, or at least it seemed that way when I was searching for an available domain name, but even though I use DNS services myself for a few secondary zones, Ive never managed to find one that actually works well. I mean, they work, but for example the one I use the most has a DNS checking tool that stopped working about a year ago when the root name servers changed, and it hasnt worked since, and although they have stats for each of your hosted domains, the stats show 6 months, in ASCENDING order, so while ive been using the site for over 5 years, Ive only ever seen my first 6 months of stats. I emailed them about that one several years ago. No response. Despite the user interface problems, its been very reliable on the DNS front, which is why I use it.

Another site I found recently, while being one of the bigger ones, seems to have everything crammed into a single plain page, from your domain list, to the editing of your primary and secondary records. They claim to have been in the business for about 10 years! I could do a better user interface than that in about 10 minutes!

I set up a secondary there to check it out. Its been over a week, and I havnt seen a single AXFR on my primary DNS from them. Im guessing no one is at the controls there either. The web site sure could have done with some updates in 10 years, but no one seems to have bothered.

I may check out a few others, since im about to max out the limited number of domains that my free accounts can handle, but why not just set up my own. I have the skills and resources, and im sure others will benefit from it too. Like I said earlier... its been on my mind for a while.

So I have a nice web framework that ive been working on over the last couple of years, and it shouldnt be too hard to just drop this on top of it. Even on day one it will be better than the second example above, and it will improve over time as I work on it.

Uh-oh. Another new project!

Well, not really. I've been meaning to do this for years - in fact, looking at my server, I first started setting up the software for this almost five years ago. Its been sitting there for a while, but Ive upgraded it, and got a test server running again - now to work on the pretty user interface.

Another thing I will have to do is create a template for this blog. Ive played with blogger templates before, but Im no designer. We'll see how it goes.

For the moment, Ive got a fair bit of work to do on the user interface. The good news is that the back end is pretty much done. The only other bit of "behind the scenes" trickery I have to do is set up replication to a server that I have access to in New York. I'd love to have one in Tokyo too, but that is something for the future.

More to come as the project matures...