I used the command line (Windows cmd to namecoind) and registered an id and there was no warning in the instructions on the dot-bit wiki about the over 519 bytes thing, so the id name is larger than 519 bytes (but less than 1023 bytes), and so when I then tried to perform a name update, I got the "error code -1 could not sign name coin output" error.

Is there anything I can do to update the id, or am I boned and I just need to wait for it to expire?

Oh well, live and learn!  The info should still be correct for 8 months anyway.

Thanks to all of you here who helped revive namecoin this past year.  It's great to see people working on the non-money uses of bitcoin.  Distributed DNS and identity verification is a really awesome thing.  Thanks for your efforts!

Get an afraid dns u

whats going on? exciting upgrades or DDOS of everything?

I'm getting namecoin.info/‎  and http://dot-bit.org/ with new AlternC access page. Just checking this is supposed to be there before I enter any login details?

https still works:
https://dot-bit.org/forum/index.php
you will probably have to add a certificate exception

Turns out it was just some misconfiguration and took a while because the servers were moved. No worries 

Not that I'm aware of.  However, I agree that Namecoin is perfect for timestamping.  I do it myself by just setting an arbitrary name's value to the document's hash.  As you state, you can reuse the name later for other timestamps, or let it expire - the document's hash will be in the blockchain as proof-of-existence at the given time forever.  In my case, I'm only interested in storing the hash, and don't want to publish the document itself in the blockchain (not sure if this makes sense at all, since you would have to pay lots of fees for even small files) or a pointer to it.  I suggest that if you want to create a public timestamped library, you could do so by setting up a separate service, and just link to a specific Namecoin transaction in the blockchain as the timestamp.

I've known Namecoin for long time, but never really much followed it, so I'm wondering:

• who currently are official Namecoin developers?
• which are official domains/sites managed by project?
• which repositories are official?

I think it used to be http://dot-bit.org/ but now seems it's http://namecoin.info/ ? Also are http://github.com/namecoin/ official repositories?

It would be nice if it all would be written in single place as it's quite easy for someone to impersonate and distribute infected binaries/code.

As mentioned already, there are several people actively working on different aspects of the Namecoin project, so it is hard to name some as "official" developers.  But to your last question, it is two times "yes".  Both dot-bit.org and namecoin.info are managed by community members that could be seen as part of the "official" core dev team, and the Github link is indeed what everyone considers to be the main repository (also managed by these community members).