Thanks for the good advice, Mr. Kroket; I'll try to keep my misdirected frustrations to myself.
My Unix is extremely weak and my scripting is even weaker so I think I'll just stick to using DynDNS.org for now until somebody decides to add OpenDNS to the list.
I'd also like to make sure my DynDNS or OpenDNS username & password are being securely transmitted over the Internet (I know for sure that DDclient does this but I'm not sure about NoIP). With this in mind, I vi'd through those two files you mentioned and looked around for a ssl=yes/no option but couldn't find any; I even searched for ddns, ddclient and noip files/folders, but to no avail. Any ideas?