At today’s IT Roundtable at ACS’ Convention, I talked about selectively blocking some media on social networking sites. I’m being nebulous in my wording because I’m paranoid. I don’t want one of the big brothers to stumble across this post and change their sites so they break my blocks. I know it probably wouldn’t happen, but like I said - I’m being paranoid.

In any case, we block sites categorized as “Radio,” including Pandora, Last.fm, etc. I also block the below sites that are used for streaming music and video on users’ profiles.  This doesn’t block all video, but it blocks pretty much all streaming music.  We’re doing this because our staff were eating all of our bandwidth with streaming audio, so I turned it off to allow for vital ministry purposes.

An interesting phenomenon has happened over the last month that has me and the IT guys at our local school district baffled. They can’t send us e-mail. So, every school, and every administrative office in our area is having difficulty in sending mail to us. We can get mail to them, though it is often delayed, but they can’t get it to us.

I’ve been talking to the chief IT guy at the district. They had a major virus about the time that these problems started. After the virus, there were about 8 domains that their people could not send mail to. He took their mail filtering device offline, and 6 of those domains were again accessible. However, our domain and another (both dot orgs) are still having problems. Curious, eh?

So, he’s not filtering us, and we’re not filtering him. He can ping our mail server, yet when a message gets sent from his network it times out. However, it doesn’t result in a NDR.

I always feel like I should blame myself, but I’m not having problems receiving mail from any other organization. In fact, I had a whole lot of people send me messages from their domains, ranging from free e-mail accounts to local ISPs to corporate Exchange addresses. Every one of them got through. Curious, eh?

We’ve been using OpenDNS at our church for quite a while. They actually began using it as our external DNS before I was employed, so I’m not sure how long we’ve been with them. I’ve got to say that I’m very impressed by their service.

I don’t have the energy to prove this, but the OpenDNS service is a TON faster than our RoadRunner Business Class external DNS. (More on RoadRunner in future posts… I don’t think a lot of their “business class” service).

In addition to rock solid, reliable DNS lookups, OpenDNS offers a host of features, many of them added in the last two months. When you sign up for an account with them, you can get a number of stats regarding your network’s Internet usage. There’s not a whole lot of detail, but the graphs and information can be helpful.

For instance, at a quick glance, I can see that the number two resolved domain yesterday was “mlb.com.” It looks like a number of our staff members weren’t completely focused on work.

They also block phishing sites and fix common domain typos. Plus, it’s all free. And, by now, you know that I like that - a lot. They do this by offering text ads on the guide page when a domain cannot be resolved. They even allow you to change the logo on that page.

But, the reason I wanted to post about OpenDNS today is this sweet new “shortcuts” feature they’ve recently added (actually about a month ago). As part of your account settings, you can enable and use shortcuts which are similar in function to AOL’s keywords.

So, I can set up a shortcut “fbc” that launches our Web site, and it saves time typing. Sure, that’s a novely, not really that big of a deal. But, how ’bout this one. Today, I set up the shortcut “bible” that launches the BibleGateway site. However, it goes one step farther. The actual shortcut redirects to http://www.biblegateway.com/quicksearch/?quicksearch=%s

So, users can type in “bible resurrection” to search for information about the resurrection or passages that contain the word resurrection. OR, they can type in “bible John 3:16″ to look up the passage John 3:16.

They’re launched network-wide immediately. No need to restart machines or wait for DNS caches to clear. It’s fast, it works well, and it’s worth a try at home or at work.