V1.07 July 1999
From DreamHost
Table of Contents 0. Introduction. 1. Okay, We Will Email It! 2. Mailing List How-To. 3. ACH Up! 4. Customer Service Form. 5. Spam Policy Review. 6. DHSOTM July '99 7. Random Quotes(s) From newdream.net 8. PHP is here! 9. Coming Features. 0. Introduction. Earthquake! I'm not just saying that because there's a lot of moving and shaking going on here at Dreamhost Central, but also because there really has been a lot of moving and shaking going on here at Dreamhost Central! That is, in the last couple of hours I've been up and thinking about making this newsletter we've suffered THREE real-live earthquakes! The whole building shook violently for about 4 seconds each time. I've never felt an earthquake before, and I think it's good that I've experienced it. But just like NT, once is enough! :) 1. Okay, We Will Email It! Last month we said we'd be only posting an announcement about new newsletters from now on, rather than emailing the whole thing out to our now teeming ranks of Happy Dreamhost Customers. But we lied, since some people have requested that we continue to email it out for various reasons we'll go ahead and keep doing that! Shweeeeet. 2. Mailing List How-To. New feature number one! We've added a bunch of features to the Mailing List, like being able to send an email to people when they subscribe, and customizing all aspects of the html form (including error messages). This time, there's even a How-To document explaining the ins and outs of its use, which is linked to right off the main Mailing List page at the Web Panel (https://secure.newdream.net/admin/ you DO remember where that is right?) 3. ACH Up! No, not a Chup, ACH up! That means Automatic Clearing House is (finally?) set up and working across all aspects of our billing! What is Automatic Clearing House? It's ACH! It's also a nation-wide system which allows for the automtic deduction of funds from United States checking accounts. Now, rather than wasting all that time and dead tree filling out, signing, and mailing a check to us (if you weren't paying by credit card, which is of course still fine, and encouraged) you can instead just go to the "Automatic Invoice Generator" area of the web panel and pay securely with your checking account online! A word of warning though.. make sure you have enough funds in your account when you submit the payment to cover the amount. If the check "bounces" we must charge a $15 fee due to the nature of ACH. Because of that we don't automatically attempt to rebill your Checking Account every month either, but rather just remind you to go to the web page and do it yourself. But don't worry, you don't have to pay for six months in advance like you used to have to with check.. monthly billing cycles are acceptable under ACH. Also, we cannot return any money withdrawn via ACH! So the 30 day money-back guarantee is not valid for those paying with ACH. 4. Customer Service Form. Another change we've made is that the Customer Service form (at https://secure.newdream.net/admin/support.cgi or http://scripts.dreamhost.com/support.cgi for ssl-unsupportive browsers) now asks for the Category of the request you are submitting. This is to allow for ever-greater customer service through more selective training of our employees and routing of your requests. Also notice that you can choose "DHSOTM" and "Suggestion" as your category. These are special categories, and anything submitted under them will not be responded to. The first one is only for Dreamhost Site of the Month submissions, and the second one is for Suggestions on improvements to Dreamhost (and are elligible for the $50 account credit each month). These submissions will all of course be read and evaluated, but cannot be responded to as normal customer service inquiries. So don't submit an "URGENT!!!" tech support message along with your Dreamhost Site of the Month submission under the category of "DHSOTM" and expect a reply is all we're sayin'! 5. Spam Policy Review. Recently there seems to have been a rash of reports of our users "spamming", either via email or newsgroups. I'm sure you all know what spam is, but we just need to re-iterate what it includes and what our policy is on it. Spam is defined as "Unsolicited, Commerical email or postings to a public forum," at least as we define it. Basically, if your message is impersonal in nature, and somebody received or read it who in no way wanted to do so, it was a spam. If you spam from our servers, or the message has mention of a site we host (even if you didn't use our resources to distribute the spam), we must immediately disable all your accounts with us! You won't be elligible for any sort of money back on your account either.. so please just don't do it! You have to realize that spam is frowned upon by just about everyone who has anything to do with the internet, including us (and your potential customers!). If we didn't have a very tough anti-spam policy we would be at a great risk of losing OUR network connectivity from our upstream providers, so you see what an important issue it is. But anyway, we should lighten up and move on, the vast majority of you have no intention of spamming anyway! 6. DHSOTM July '99 This month it was clubs,organizations, and/or corporate web sites, and all the entrants from those categories can be found at the end of the newsletter as always. This month there actually seemed to be a bit of a lag in the entries. I'm sure it will pick up next month though when it's Web Stores and Malls! Those are the sorts of sites dying for exposure.. so don't forget to submit your site if it falls in that category sometime this month (you can submit through the web panel now!) This month's winner is WAVE, which you can find at: http://www.waveart.net/ which is a group that has the purpose of supporting women in the visual arts. Check out the exhibits, there's some nice stuff there! 7. Random Quotes(s) From newdream.net Work is the crab grass in the lawn of life. -- Schulz and Spend less time working and more time making websites. -- H.D. Employee 8. PHP is here! That's right, we're very excited to be able to offer PHP as part of our CGI-enabled accounts now! What's PHP you ask? It's a neat little scripting language that lets you embed programming code into your html pages and it's getting really popular lately - for good reason! In general it's considered to be an easier language to learn than Perl but since it actually works on the server-side it's more powerful than Javascript. You can do a lot of stuff with it, including most of the stuff people use Perl for when they write CGI scripts, and it's especially good at doing any kind of database-related stuff (with MySQL databases for instance, which we just happen to support on the Strictly Business plan). PHP is great, hooray for PHP! You can learn more about PHP at: http://www.php.net/ which also has links to some great web tutorials on how to use PHP in their links section. If you're on an account that has CGI included (Code Warrior for instance) and you want to use PHP just let us know through the support form and we'll set you up with it! 9. Coming Features. Uh oh.. it looks like the earthquake wiped out the list of coming features for the next month! We don't have time to recreate it so it looks like it will just have to be a surprise this time! ;) Other sites to check out from the DHSOTM contest for July: (This time in reverse alphabetical order. Musta been the earthquakes.) http://www.utopica.com/ http://www.urltrackers.org/ http://www.sydneydruzesociety.com/ http://www.stopthewarnow.org/ http://www.pulsate.org/ http://www.puckfans.com/ http://www.piemovie.com/ http://www.pcbolivia.org/ http://www.nmdesigns.net/ http://www.jazzfanz.com/ http://www.factor-software.com/ http://www.enerjazz.com/ http://www.dreamdust.com/ http://www.doggonegraphics.com/ http://www.deliduck.com/ http://www.alhena-design.com/
