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.

We talked about a To-Do list just one post before this one, and thought of sharing our To-Do list, but just for this blog. If you’ve been a regular of the previous design, you would have noticed several features missing in this incarnation - namely, feed aggregation from the rest of the is-there blogs, and a suitable blogroll.

Hence our To-Do list:

1. Dedicated feed aggregation page. Given our love for 2-column designs, it isn’t likely that we’ll be adding a third column just for is-there feeds. Therefore, it is likely that we’ll setup a separate feed aggregation page which will serve your needs better.
2. Dedicated links page. While this isn’t a network at all, we’re thinking of putting up a links page for the is-there blogs, rather than just stuff them in the sidebar. Though it is likely we’ll still add a footer blogroll to share the Google PageRank juice from the index page.
3. Header bar design. We’re thinking of adding a header bar (not a header replacement) above the normal header itself. It’ll be something like a navigation bar, so nothing surprising there. Among the pages that will be linked to include an advertiser’s destination page, design notes, and probably a couple of FAQs.

And… that’s it for now.

Drupal somehow konked on us, so we’ll be switching back to WordPress ASAP. So, till then, please bear with us.

P.S. There are a number of other reasons why we’re switching to WordPress, but that’s definitely content for another post.

Out of a need to express my opinion (well… maybe), Malaysia.Is-There was born. Check it out by clicking the logo below.

For Malaysia.Is-There, I’m planning Malaysian news, as well as the various (newsworthy) going-ons that happen not to make the news. What type of news? Well, the logo says it all, I think.

Look for the silver lining under every dark cloud. Well, that’s what I did with the recent downtime I experienced with the is-there blogs. With quite a number of my blogs down, I took the time to launch a new blog on another one of my domains.

We now have Cats Eyes - Dzi Beads - Crystals, a blog that reports news and provides serious (and not-so-serious) info on these archaic and modern stones and gems.

Aggregation of the feeds from this blog has already begun, and you can check it out at the bottom of the feed list on the right most sidebar.

All the is-there blogs recently experienced severe downtime (more than 24 hours) due to hardware problems on the host’s side. However, I hope I can say that the problem has been resolved and that this should not reoccur anytime soon.

Hopefully, the downtime did not inconvenience regular readers of each and every one of the blogs (too much). I would like to say sorry for the downtime and thank you for your continued support!

P.S. I’m still not sure exactly what caused this downtime yet, given that the host’s support side has yet to reply.