When last sighted here I promised Brother Wade I would come back with a recommended way to avoid being juked into the badlands by a greedy Internet Service Provider's DNS moneymaking scheme.

The editor was up past midnight in Israel a few months ago, trying to post an Editor's Journal blog.

Here in Raleigh I watched through an encrypted shell connection as the blog server smoothly delivered services to users somewhere, while on the same machine a Firefox browser misinformed me that the site was down. On a second machine, my Wireshark network analyzer argued that the "site-down" messages were coming from what presented itself as one of a major ISP's Domain Name System servers -- not from the Southern Connections blog server.

Everaldo Coelho and YellowIcon

GNU Lesser General Public License

Domain Name System (DNS) servers translate human-friendly names like southernconnections.com, which we can remember and use, into numerical Internet addresses like 207.243.70.226, which are required by the machines which drive Internet services.

Hoping to duck around what to my eye was a species DNS blockage, I fed Firefox a carefully internet address, only to be dumped onto a page of ads. Whereupon I turned angrily to the Wireshark machine and we dug out the owner of the ad page's domain name -- a British company called Barefruit.

That's when I began growling at myself about ISP techs who misconfigure DNS manipulation software.

EarthLink, for example, has used Barefruit since August of 2006 to return Web pages full of search terms and advertising when a DNS server can't the Web page a Web surfer asked for. Usually because a case of fumble fingers on the keyboard misspelled something in the URL.

That practice has a lot of ugly names, like typosquatting.

It is said to make Earthlink, Quest and a lot of other ISPs a lot of money.

My encounters in the wild with various forms of the software involved suggest that it's not quite the tame technology they describe.

This time, the editor was losing sleep in Israel, trying to post a blog to the Editor's Journal, and I wanted to find some configuration of my own which had provoked the beast. One I could change and send the beasat away. Being at fault myself was fine, as long as I could solve the problem.

I knew there was nothing amiss in Southern Connections' DNS tables (though I reviewed and tested them again to be sure). Every DNS table I set up has the protective "wildcard" entry which purveyors of this service say offers immunity.

I even scoured the blog configuration and source code for anything that could emit the illusion of a DNS error or like provocation, and changed nothing which talked to the network.

Nor did I change anything else about the messages Southern Connections' servers were emitting.

Yet the problem went away, albeit too late to make the editor's time in Israel more pleasant. It left like some nocturnal predator, padding off for inscrutable reasons to another hunting ground.

I hadn't caused or fixed it. Until Saturday when learned from Wired's Threat Level blog of Seattle network security analyst Dan Kaminsky's recent work, I wasn't sure understood it correctly.

Kaminsky, who is well-known for his part in uncovering the Sony rootkit incident, showed that dozens of ISP's are using Barefruit or other, similar technologies to mount advertising on what are by some standard "unused" subdomains of live, legitimate Web presences, that security-threatening javascript was involved and other issues are in play.

Here is how it works: For these purposes, journal.example.com is a subdomain of example.com. The "journal" subdomain is "unused" if it isn't properly recorded in the DNS tables of example.com's owners. As a result, when a DNS server is asked about journal.example.com, unless that wildcard entry I mentioned earlier is present , the DNS server answers "NXDOMAIN."

That means "no such domain" and according to those involved, that "NXDOMAIN" message is the trigger which deploys ad-rich subdomain pages to some unfortunate Web user.

Unless the editor is in Israel losing sleep, trying to post a blog entry. Then in keeping with Murphy's Law, a well-known subdomain can be interfered with in various and perhaps technologically subtle ways which are a lot like denial of service.

(This topic is blogged in somewhat more technical detail at Spoiled fruit of ISP domain name system mining.)

BRBloggers got a promotion on Thursday.

The Biblical Recorder wants online readers to find all of the most up-to-date content, and to find it with ease.

As a part of that effort, starting in the wee, dark hours Thursday morning, the 10 most recently posted BRBlog entries were listed in the right-hand column of every page on the main site.

The list of blog jump links to most recent blogs is on the home page, every subindex page and every story page.

They even have their own section in the right nav bar -- "Most Recent Blogs."

Let the Biblical Recorder staff know what you think, and what else you want.

To do that, just add a comment here, or use the Biblical Recorder Feedback form.

I'll bet you dollars to donuts the Biblical Recorder staff will read every word, and if you want an answer, you'll get one. Not that I'm gambling, you understand. Just a friendly bet, and there's no doubt.

Set your goals, start now and strive to improve.

Set your goals as well as time permits.

Then you will know whether to pull the plug, when to redouble your efforts and when to celebrate your success.

But first and foremost, start now.

Ethically responsible bloggers agree that the first principle of error correction is to do everything you can to avoid making a correctible error.

"What are you doing?", twitter asks every user:

As of early Monday, delivering the Biblical Recorder's message to twitter's roughly 500,000 members.

The number is growing at a rate of some 2,000 a day. Together in that network space and with twitter's software they create a rich social and information space through what is most often called microblogging. More precisely, twitter is a "real-time broadcasting service."

Call it what you will, they stay in touch and they stay informed in what in my experience thus far proves to be a useful and mutually enriching process. 

What the Biblical Recorder publishes there is messages, called tweets, each containing a headline and link to an updated story or other content. They are the necessary beachhead on the huge and growing social networks that are (in concept but not for every implementation) permanent additions the the information ecology of the Web. 

Take a look at our early implementation and help us shape the future through feedback via BRBlogs, email or twitter.

Please use your Web browser to visit http://twitter.com/brblogs, where you will find links to recent BRBlogs.

To keep up with Baptist news, get a twitter account (they're free) and "follow" http://twitter.com/biblicalrecord.

Links to the latest Biblical Recorder editorial page content are at http://twitter.com/biblical. 

For the Sunday School lessons via twitter, go to http://twitter.com/brecorder. 

Twitter space is a comfortable place for an old newsman and, I suspect, for computer literate newspaper readers.

If you take a good, long look at twitter in action, you will see why a good newspaper editor whose career spanned the lead-type era would immediately understand the Biblical Recorder's publication there.

Twitter has the appearance of and for its members often fulfills the news-telling function of the old newswires, with improvements.

If twitter is a newswire, it is a newswire that has been democratized and made generally accessible and environmentally sound and socially agile:

• Twitter is free, rather than affordable only by a few for tightly constrained purposes.
• Twitter is written by everyone about everything and read by others as they wish or need.
• Twitter requires no awkward, noisy wire machines hammering ink onto spools of pulp paper.
• Twitter is graced and driven by the networks of friends and associates who "follow" each other's tweets (messages) and some of whom will "follow" the Biblical Recorder's news there.
• Content published on twitter remains the property of the creator.
  
• Twitter is the foundation and starting place for a growing list of other useful services and application. Like twitterverse, Terraminds search and a long list of others.
  

That last point brings us to one of twitter's most important and least obvious advantages.

Twitter has a readily accessible, altogether usable "software interface."

Thus the Biblical Recorder and any number of other publications and services with the initiative, and a programmer about, can publish links to their content into the same river of news and information where so many of my friends and the New York Times and and any number of one-reader blogs started last night all swim together.

As you will see if you sign up, material published into that space need not merely be another pebble in the pond.

People do find what they're interested in finding, and in large numbers. They will find the Biblical Recorder, just as you will, and to some degree will be brought together by the finding.  

All you really need is a means of connection -- usually a cellphone or a computer -- and a means of driving keystrokes.

Twitter is, after all, designed to be used by anyone from anywhere. Staying in touch with your friends and associates no matter where you are, and informed, is the beating heart of it. Making those things possible, simultaneously, requires remarkable ease of use.

Twitter is just the right social-network place for a news publication, and may fit your needs as well.

If you have the inclination, join us there, at least for a while, and let us know how it works out.

Indeed, I'm there waiting now, and will help.

Share the spirit, and your insight.

Organize your Web gleanings for future use.

Social bookmark your favorite BRBlogs.

Save as Draft and Full Preview are tandem features of Roller 3.1.

They play together well, especially with Web browsers which support tabbed browsing. It is as easy as one, two.

Your blog's tag cloud is a dynamic, hyperlinked graphic, reflecting and summarizing your online thought.

Tag clouds are "mind maps."

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Today's Editor's Journal upgrade simplifies navigation, streamlines content creation and makes it straightforward to stream groups of blogs focused on (for example) the interests of a single church congregation.

Readers can scan the faster front page, visit a hot blog, drop in on a blog that generate lots of reader comment or peruse the alphabetical list of published site blogs to find the one they want. and fast text search is still an option.

Moving an active blog community from one platform to another is a considerable undertaking.

We did it. We moved from Scoop to Roller.

Welcome to the Biblical Recorder Editor's Journal in Roller, where Standards Conformant HTML works best.

This is a minimalist guide to blogging Roller with Standards Conformant style.