Ever wondered what kind of stuff finance executives handle? Ever wanted a regional (Asian) perspective on complex or oft-misunderstood accounting procedures? Well, is-there is proud to welcome a blog that should satisfy all those needs: FMAccounting.

Written by an experienced regional financial controller, the blog is filled with nuggets of information you’ll be hard pressed to find elsewhere. Samples of documents and agreements are but a glimpse of the knowledge you could glean.

Yes, I’m not joking.

What we hate most about Movable Type isn’t that we actually have to pay for a multi-user license of what should ideally be free, but that we have to live with dreaded White-Screen-Of-Deaths (WSODs) and Internal Server Errors (Error 500). Yes, yes. The Internal Server Errors bug should have been resolved already. But as the announcement says, only hosts that actually bother to update their CPanels (or whatever command panel software they bundle in with your hosting plan) will actually resolve the bug.

And yes, our host isn’t one of these hosts that keep up with this kind of relatively minute mySQL updates. Apparently, many hosts haven’t resolved this problem either - leaving quite a number of frustrated MT users (normally office users). In fact, even when this “isolated bug” is resolved, other errors could as easily pop-up.

Switching hosts is an alternative, but it’s an irritating one. How we wish we could just abandon MT for WordPress right now! Now, that’s a great piece of trouble-free, and financially-free software.

P.S. A blog platform switch isn’t practical given the SERP losses that we would have to shoulder.

We’ve been considering adding a dedicated page just to provide some sort of “description listing” of all the is-there blogs. We figure that it would be good for advertisers to get a preliminary view of all the blogs (especially in light of our upcoming “network”-wide AdBrite use) or even for curious visitors that might end up visiting the described blogs.

Adding a screenshot or the blog logo would probably also be part of such an endeavour. But the real question is how long should the description be. So far, we’re thinking of one paragraph. That is probably just long enough to give a brief (and hopefully, catchy) description of the blog, without inundating our dear readers with stuff they could easily find out by visiting the blog itself.

But until the design of the proposed over-the-header navigation bar is completed, this “description listing” will have to wait (agonizingly) on our To Do list for this blog.

We’ve been playing around with free articles recently in one of our “faux” blogs: The Fishing Rod. Besides free articles, there’s almost nothing else. All we’ve value-added is some comments before and after the articles. And these comments are terribly light on content.

So, why the free articles? Well, we’re doing this as part of an experiment with search engines and free articles. There have been conclusive tests before that have proven that free articles are usually not indexed, and even the originator of the articles could end up being excluded by top search engines like Google and Yahoo! - though MSN seems to be more adept at determining the source of the free articles.

After about a month of posting, and another month of rest, we can report that The Fishing Rod has only had its main page indexed by the search engines. Yes, only one page. The free article permalink pages have completely been avoided. But the once empty Google adverts have begun populating a bit more across all the pages, even though those pages are not shown in the SERPs. We’ve had a few odd advert clicks here and there as well.

In any case, one month is still too short a time period for an experiment such as this one, so we’ll probably be keeping it going for quite a while longer. This means that posting will be restarting soon enough.

As many would know, AdBrite is a text ad marketplace, where publishers sell space on their sites (or blogs) to advertisers for a daily, weekly, monthly (or any other time frame, really) period. While CPC and Intermission advertisements are available, this BlogAd-style, time period advertising system is probably the most popular choice among both publishers and advertisers.

Recently, we’ve been thinking of putting up AdBrite on a “network”-wide basis - though is-there isn’t a network per se - which will result in the same AdBrite adverts being shown across all is-there blogs. The benefits of this are obvious: More impressions, clickthroughs and thus, lower ACPCs for advertisers, making each advertising deal more advantageous. More advantageous deals then tend to attract more advertisers.

But the downside is equally clear: Adverts will be contextually irrelevant across many blogs due to the “network”-wide nature of the advertisements. Just look at b5media’s implementation of this to see what I mean. There are advertisements about plastic on entertainment or even blogging blogs like Problogger.

So, it’s clearly going to be pretty hard balancing revenue vs. relevance when such an advertising system does get implemented. However, that is unlikely to stop us from trying it out as “network”-wide Adbrite ads would definitely allow us to access a larger advertiser market.

Anyone using Dreamhost should (or rather, must) know that the rewrite rules in each new CMS (Content Management System) installation (including Dreamhost’s own One-Click Installs) will break access to Dreamhost’s statistics package. And why should anyone care about the stats package that Dreamhost provides? After all, Dreamhost only provides Analog. But the Analog isn’t the important thing. The important part of the stats package is the CPU usage statistics provided by the stats package.

All shared hosting packages in Dreamhost come with 60 minutes of server CPU usage (at the time of writing of this post). Exceeding it will generally mean isolation into a special “containment” server, and maybe even account termination. Therefore, knowing how much server CPU usage you’re using is terribly important.

So, how do you restore the “broken” stats package? Simple: Click into The Relevant Page in the Dreamhost Wiki! After that, just follow the simple instructions of adding a few lines into your root .htaccess file. At least, that’s what was needed for this blog.