Now that you solved it, you should probably set debug to False and instead have it send email to you when something goes down like this: http://docs.djangoproject.com/en/1.2/howto/error-reporting/

You probably already did it, but just in case. I'd feel bad if you didn't set it and someone broke in because I didn't say anything.

Also on the topic of Django, idk if you can use it on dreamhost but for Django people in general Fabric is a pretty cool deployment system. I'm using it at work and once I wrote my fabfile, everything became incredibly easy to push to the server with safety checks in place etc. I guess if you're used to rails it's supposedly much more barebones than Capistrano though.

hmmmm FABRIC i should check that shit out.

i am liking django!  it is really simple and has a lot of cool ideas going on.