I was first introduced to DSHIELD last month. Particularly, my interest was in the textual feeds of recommended hosts to block at the firewall. The lists come in the form of a text file formatted with individual hosts and entire networks. The feeds are refreshed on a regular basis from community input. I wrote a small shell script to pull these recommended lists and create an iptables chain that is called from my existing server firewalling rules. The input, output and forwarding chains all call the DSHIELD chain. After about a month of use it seems to have paid off, because the DSHIELD chain in my firewall rules blocks many packets from these blacklisted hosts - and so far no one has complained. This script is run nightly to refresh the DSHIELD chain. If for any reason it cannot contact the DSHIELD site, it will keep the existing rules in place.
Here is the BASH shell script I use on Fedora and CentOS servers.