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Hooking the lizard brain up to the cerebral cortex

Sunday, September 20, 2009 by Dave Winer.

This is worth a special post as a followup to the earlier piece, it's so interesting. 

I was talking with a friend today, he's an expert in DNS, and I said it's too bad people can't open their supercloud.org sub-domain in a browser. I understood why this wasn't possible: 

1. The browser is looking for an A record or a CNAME, and we're setting the TXT record. 

My friend who doesn't want me to say his name (and I respect that) said it might not have to be that way. We talked about connecting the DNS with HTTP and it was really intriguing. If you think about it, DNS is like the lizard brain of the Internet, and HTTP, while it is in some ways lower tech than DNS, is the cerebral cortex. To have them integrate is like bringing the Wright Brothers plane they flew at Kitty Hawk on an Apollo moon mission. But that's the way we do things in techland.  

Then I thought -- wait a minute, what's to stop me from also registering an A record that points back to me, and then keeping a database locally that associates a name with an RSS URL. Then when you open your supercloud.org subdomain in a browser: 

1. It comes to my machine. 

2. It looks you up in the database I'm keeping that's a mirror of what's in the TXT records in DNS.  

3. From there I get your RSS address. 

4. To which I simply do a 302 redirect. 

Hah! I had to try it. And guess what! The fcuker works!!  

Try it out: http://davewiner.supercloud.org/.  

And then go through the registration process, and try it out yourself.  

This is actually important because everyone expected taht you'd be able to open the supercloud.org sub-domain in the browser. Now you can.