Richmond Free WiFi Blog

Some of our generous gateway bandwidth donors are starting to use OpenDNS for the RFW network. What is OpenDNS you ask? Excellent question! Some of its features include (from the OpenDNS website. Note: Some of the features below are turned off or on by the respective bandwidth donor) Click on the picture to the right for a screenshot of OpenDNS in action on the RFW network:

• Phishing protection - OpenDNS operates PhishTank.com, the world’s most trusted source of phishing data. We integrate that data into an intelligence feed on our DNS servers to keep everyone on your network safe from phony sites trying to steal personal information.
• Adult site blocking - Safeguard your kids, protect your students, or limit your corporate liability by blocking adult websites. Our adult site blocking solution can be deployed in minutes and provides granular levels of blocking. Did we mention it’s completely free?
• Typo correction - We don’t think you should be punished with an annoying error message if you make a small typo, like typing google.cmo instead of google.com. That’s why we correct that typo, and thousands more like it every day.
• Large cache - OpenDNS operates the largest and most intelligent DNS caches in the world. As a result, when you ask us a question, we almost always have the answer. This results in an overall faster way to navigate the Internet.
• Ultra-reliable network - Our architecture was designed to withstand even the worst of network failures and still serve your DNS reliably. Feel free to dive in and learn more about our architecture and how we run a zero-downtime network.

For more info, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in helping out! If you’re ready to participate, check out our “host a node” page.

We’re pleased to announce banner advertising opportunities on the Richmond Free Wireless network splash page. A benefit to advertisers is that every user is required to go through our splash page providing 100% banner visibility to our users.

Businesses and individuals alike are welcome to advertise to help us:

• offset our operating expenses as well as
• allowing us to purchase more nodes and gateways to help us expand our network and

• paying for our bandwidth costs to allow us to deploy nodes and gateways in strategic locations

Feel free to check our our banner advertising page for more info!

Even if you can’t host a node, you can still show your support for RFW by posting one of the following buttons on your website or blog.

Option 1:

To display this button, copy and paste the following code into your webpage:

<a href="http://richmondfreewifi.org/">
    <img src="http://blog.richmondfreewifi.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/rfw1-150-25.gif"
    alt="Richmond Free Wifi" style="border: none;"/>
</a>

Option 2:

For this button, use the following code:

<a href="http://richmondfreewifi.org/">
    <img src="http://blog.richmondfreewifi.org/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/rfw1-150-40.gif"
    alt="Richmond Free Wifi"  style="border: none;"/>
</a>

Feel free to use these on your own site and help us spread the word!

Looks like we have a ways to go to move beyond 15th place out of currently 22 Meraki networks. How about seeing if we can add a few more nodes/repeaters to help expand the RFW network? $50 one-time is a small price to pay to help grow our regional wireless freenet!

For more info, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in helping out! If you’re ready to participate, check out our “host a node” page.

Every so often we like to surf around and see what other freenet initiatives/projects are up to. We came across an interesting marketing plan for U-Link, an initiative based in Missouri, that highlights marketing free wireless to apartment tenants/residents.

This could be a good way to market the RFW initiative to area developers, property owners/managers and residents and tenants. We also highlighted this on a post recently made at our discussion forum where a local property manager expressed a valid concern about file sharing, etc.

For more info, feel free to contact us if you’re interested in helping out! If you’re ready to participate, check out our “host a node” page. In addition, feel free to visit our discussion forum to converse with our current volunteers.