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The [...] was a big list of objects tied to the r64 library. So, I dropped a note to the folks at Pinch and received this great reply.

- You want to build an app that will work on iPhone OS 2.2 devices.
- You’re switching Base SDK to do so

According to Apple (no link handy, but I heard this all the time at
WWDC last week), you should do the following:

- Set Base SDK (for all configurations) to iPhone Device 3.0
- Set iPhone OS Deployment Target to iPhone OS 2.2 (or whichever you
like)

(You’ll find these settings in the Build tab if you Get Info on your
project (the top item in the Groups & Files pane in Xcode)

The issue is that they’re using a newer compiler in the 3.0 SDK, and
we’re going with their Best Practices (use 3.0 SDK, choose a
lower-version Target if you wish), and there are some features of the
compiler (which generates code that works all the way down to 2.0)
that are only available with the 3.0 release.

I’m sharing it here because it applies to pretty much any app.

** Also, if you are developing with OpenFeint make sure you grab the 6.16 release. This is the first release that will compile properly with the 3.0SDK.

Fatal error: Call to undefined method WordPress_Module::_weak_escape() in ../wp-includes/wp-db.php

Chances are you have the Redirection plugin. Anything prior to version 2.1.14 will throw this error when you upgrade. Of course, it would have been nice if you upgraded the plugin prior to upgrading WordPress, but you didn’t do that… did you?

I didn’t either.

No worries. The solution is simple enough:

1. Rename the /wp-content/plugins/redirection directory to /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad (or something like that) – This will cause WordPress to disable the plugin.
2. You should be able to log into the WP admin now.
3. Go to Plugins in the WP admin and confirm that the Redirection plugin is disabled.
4. Change the /wp-content/plugins/redirection-bad back to /wp-content/plugins/redirection.
5. Refresh the Plugins page in the WP admin.
6. You should be able to use the automatic upgrade now on the Redirection plugin.

If you have other blogs to upgrade, try upgrading the plugin first… unless you like this sort of thing.

April iTunes Price Increase

Price increase, did I say? Well, sort of. According to this press release, iTunes audio will all be DRM free in April but instead of $0.99 there will be a sliding scale based on some magical formula worked out between Apple and the records labels:

“We are thrilled to be able to offer our iTunes customers DRM-free iTunes Plus songs in high quality audio and our iPhone 3G customers the ability to download music from iTunes anytime, anywhere over their 3G network at the same price as downloading to your computer or via Wi-Fi,” said Steve Jobs, Apple’s CEO. “And in April, based on what the music labels charge Apple, songs on iTunes will be available at one of three price points—69 cents, 99 cents and $1.29—with many more songs priced at 69 cents than $1.29.”

Back to the Amazon Downloader

Ok, well, who knows what this really means. I guess we’ll find out in April. In any case, I tried the Amazon MP3 Downloader on a whim and I liked it.

The Amazon MP3 Downloader is a small application for OSX and Windows that will tie Amazon music downloads into iTunes Library or the Windows Media Player.

I tried out the program on the Mac, and it was simple:

1. Install the Amazon MP3 Downloader.
2. Select music from the Amazon library of MP3 digital downloads.
3. Downloads begin automatically, triggering the application to load.
4. Enjoy… Really, that’s it. To prove it, I created a little video of me buying a song (go full-screen for a better view of the screenshots):

As you can see, the progress of your downloads appears in the application. You can even pause and resume if you need to. Oh, and I still suck at making screencasts but maybe I’ll get better with practice – or not.

Downloaded files end up in a folder called “Amazon MP3″ (in the Music folder) and you can also have files automatically loaded into the iTunes library. Both options are turned on by default (see screenshot below).

“Right! Now let’s have a proper screencast!”

You see, yesterday, I ran a little survey on Awesome Mustache to gauge the reaction of the Twitterverse to Chris Brogan’s recent face shaving. Admittedly, this is a silly reason to run a survey but it was better than musing about “Twitter Authority.”

As it was a silly thing, I wasn’t going to pay a nickel to collect the data. I didn’t want to install any software either. So, I decided to use the Forms feature of Google Docs.

When you create a form in Google Docs, you can embed the form in a web page, email it, or use the standalone page to collect responses. Responses are stored in a Google Docs spreadsheet and there is also a nice little summary report available complete with charts. This was perfect for my needs.

Here is the form embedded in a post on Awesome Mustache and here are the survey results, sliced up in my follow-up post.

After this went out, I received a few questions about creating the survey, so I whipped up this little screencast demo using ScreenFlow on my Mac. Sorry if it isn’t the most polished of demos but I think you’ll find everything you need to jump into Google Docs Forms and make your own poll or survey:

*Go full screen on this so that you can see the menu choices and such.

The Feedproxy service is basically a clone of FeedBurner that hooks directly into AdSense. This allows the site owner to theoretically monetize a feed. It theoretical of course because someone actually has to click on the ads. In addition to AdSense integration, Feedproxy also implements the Google Analytics charting engine so the reports look better. Aside from that, it’s identical to FeedBurner… for now.

As I started down the path, I came across this brief article. The process was straightforward enough, but I thought I’d expand the step-by-step instructions, add a bit about AdSense setup, and then give you my initial impressions of the service:

Step-by-Step Instructions

1. Log into AdSense.
2. Select the AdSense Setup tab
3. Choose AdSense for Feeds from the list of available services

4. Way down at the bottom of the page, hit the link for “Move FeedBurner feeds to your Google Account”

5. You’ll be asked to log into FeedBurner and then presented with the list of all your feeds. I didn’t see a way to opt out of moving some feeds so I just went ahead and moved all the feeds on my account.
6. Wait.

7. Once the feeds are moved, Google gives you a confirmation. At the bottom of page, your feeds will appear along with links to the new feed URLs. Do not leave this page.
8. Open a new tab in your browser and log into your WordPress (or other blog tool admin).
9. I use the FeedSmith plugin so updating the URL for the feed was as simple as copying the link from the page mentioned at step #7 and pasting it into Settings->FeedBurner.
10. Rinse and Repeat for Remaining Blogs

When you’re done, move onto setting up your AdSense ads…

AdSense Integration with Feeds

One of the most compelling reasons is the integration with AdSense. AdSense integration provides you with a simple, automatic way to monetize your feed. Ultimately, if you have enough subscribers, you may want to sell ads in a different way but for the beginner or small player AdSense is the quick and easy way to go.

After Google migrates your feed, you can set up AdSense units tied to individual feeds or across all the sites you manage. Standard AdSense options for type and color should be familiar to AdSense publishers, with a special twist added for frequency, post-length, and position.

Frequency – This option allows you to define how often ads show up in the stream. You can choose to show ads after each feed item or skip to the 2nd, 3rd, or 4th item. I chose to show the ad after every second item.

Post-Length – Allow you to limit ads so that only appear after posts of a certain word count. I suppose this would be useful if you had many small posts and didn’t want to clutter your feed.

Position – As you might expect, this allows you to decide where the ad shows up in relationship to the feed item. (top or bottom)

Don’t get antsy after you hit SAVE. Google says it takes about 10 minutes for the ads to show up. Took a little longer for me.

Initial Impressions

Instead of logging into feedburner.com, you log into http://feedburner.google.com. Everything basically looks the same (for now). However, the chart looks like a Google Analytics chart. I’ve included a sample below from one of my sites:

One of the reasons I made this switch is that I was hoping to have more accurate stats. I can’t tell you if the new service is better at updating or not, but I can say that the reports look better.

I also make use of FeedBurner’s email forms. I’m glad to say that I didn’t need to change anything here. The forms work as they should, confirmation text was retained from FeedBurner too. Hooray!

I’ll post a follow-up in a few days to let you all know if the reliability improved.

I love the simplicity of the wp-quotes plugin by Zombie Robot. It does what it’s supposed to do and it does it well. Until it doesn’t of course.

There was a wee bit of a problem with the latest WordPress update to version 2.6.2: it broke the admin interface for wp-quotes.

This happened because I used the InstantUpgrade plugin. InstantUpgrade is excellent, but overwrites files in the wp-admin directory with impunity. Of course, it might be a good idea if the author of wp-quotes hadn’t put the edit-quotes.php file in the wp-admin directory. But let’s not quibble, shall we?

So here’s the fix for wp-quotes admin interface after upgrading to WordPress 2.6.2:

• Visit Zombie Robot and download wp-quotes 1.3 again.
• Unzip the archive
• Upload the file edit-quotes.php to your /wp-admin directory
• Enjoy wp-quotes again until the next upgrade.

Pretty simple, I know. Just thought I’d note it for posterity since I couldn’t find the answer anywhere else and just tried it for the heck of it.

There was no obvious reason for the problem. All of the permissions looked good. Everything was set as it had been for months. However, when I de-authorized anonymous users from access to content and then reauthorized them again everything started working fine.

Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Perhaps too simple. However, this is exactly what I did:

• Unchecked the box for “access content” under Admin:User Management:Access Control:Node
• Clicked “Save Permissions”
• Rechecked the box for “access content” under Admin:User Management:Access Control:Node
• Clicked “Save Permissions”

Everything works! No more “access denied!”

I read quite a few Drupal threads about this “access denied” problem but no one seemed to go about doing the same thing. It seems very odd for Drupal to suddenly forget about permissions, but truth is stranger than fiction. Guess I’d better think about the Drupal 6.0 upgrade!

Hope this helps!

While I enjoy wading through these articles, it’s a bit much for the casual user. So, I thought I’d focus on 5 special plugins I put on every blog I create.

The first two plugins focus on driving more discussion on your site, the next two help you manage your content, and the last two give your site a little search engine boost. Wait a minute, that’s six plugins! Well, number 4 is actually both a site management and a search engine helper, so consider it a bonus!

5 WordPress Plugins You Need for Your Corporate Blog

1. Subscribe to Comments – Once someone posts a comment, you should make it easy for them to keep track of the conversation. This is where Subscribe to Comments comes in. Subscribe to Comments puts a small checkbox under your comment box. Visitors leaving comments can check the box to receive an email notice each time someone else posts a follow-up. This convenience helps turns commenters into active participants in the discussion by keeping them up to date on the conversation and providing a quick link back to share additional thoughts.

2. Comment Luv – The URL field in the comment block gives a visitor an opportunity to get a link back to their own website. This provides an automatic incentive to leave a comment worthy of a click, but you can encourage more comments by adding the Comment Luv plugin. Comment Luv reads the URL left by the commenter, pulls back the first entry in the RSS feed from that site, and inserts a link to the post (with title) at the end of the comment.

3. In Series – If you write multipart articles, you know just how much fun it is to go back and make sure all of the back posts have the links to the latest articles. The In Series plugin allows you to define a series and assign articles to the series much as you would a category. In addition, the plugin places a nice table of contents at the bottom of each post for quick access.

4. Redirection – This plugin allows you to set up special URLs on your site to redirect visitors to certain posts or articles. For example, you could set up www.somesite.com/turtleracing to point to your latest article about Turtle Racing. In addition, the plugin will also set up redirects automatically when you change categories or permalinks for a post. This is absolutely a lifesaver and a must have, even if you never set up that Turtle racing page you will be glad you have Redirection installed.

5. All in One SEO Pack – This nifty plugin automatically adjusts your WordPress to take advantage of many SEO best practices (copy, titles, noindex tags, etc). Note: the author is no longer actively developing this plugin but I’ve found it to be extremely stable.

I hope this helps. If you have a few special plugins that you like, please drop a note in the comments and subscribe to comment updates.

When you look at your data, you might just find that CRT is far from dead and 800×600 still defines a majority of your audience.

Designers: Time to Go Back to School

In the US, CRTs still rule the schools. There are several solid reasons why this might remain the case for some time to come:

• Durability – It’s pretty hard to scratch the glass on CRT.
• Security – after all who steals a CRT?
• Financial – While LCD prices have come down, many older computers need video card upgrades to tap into them. In addition, there’s another good argument: “if it ain’t broke, why fix it?”

On the educational sites I’ve worked with, it is not uncommon to see 80% of the visitors coming in at 800×600. This might bum out the designers, but they have to be sensitive to that data. If the visitors are captive to the lower resolution, they’re not going to take kindly to a fancy design that causes endless scrolling.

Marketers: This is Your Father’s Internet

Going back to my last article, I mentioned early adopters and how they are likely to upgrade to the latest and greatest. Looking at demographic studies, the top end of that group generally falls into the under-50 crowd with some reports inching up toward age 55.

Even though marketers have good reason to salivate over the potential of the most well-off group of retirees in the history of the country, the fact of the matter is that new computers are pretty far down the list for the majority of that group. They might have a 50″ television set in the living room, but there’s a dusty old CRT in the den.

And it’s probably going to stay that way for quite awhile.

So what do you do with this data?

You dig deeper and you test.

Based on my experience, I’d focus on developing a design that places less emphasis on fast scanning and links between areas of the site. You are likely to find that this segment will spend more time reading your copy and less time looking for the “scent of information”. This means they’ll also get quite frustrated when you make then dig to get what they want.

Of course, I might be completely wrong about your audience. That’s why I recommend you dig into the data and test.

I realize it’s hard not to go glassy-eyed when designers and web developers start spouting phrases like “aspect ratio” and “backwards compatibility,” but listen up, marketing folks! Browser and screen resolutions matter because there’s money to be made.

“What’s that Browser Capabilities menu?”

Every web analytics package has that seldom viewed report called “browser capabilities” (or something similar). In that section, you will find such thrilling choices as:

• Browsers
• Operating Systems
• Screen Resolutions
• … More things you don’t want to know.

But drop on in there and ask yourself these questions:

1. Who converts better? Mac or PC users? Vista, XP, or OSX?
2. What is the average order size of visitors who use 800×600 vs. 1280×1024?
3. Do Firefox users buy more than IE6 users? What about IE7?

That’s Nice. Why Do I Care?

When I looked at recent stats for one site, I was surprised to find out that Mac users were the most valuable customers. In fact, the lift on PC users was over 80%. When I dug a little deeper, I found that XP users, while a very large percentage of the visitor pool, lagged well behind Vista.

What kind of conclusions might we draw from this information?

Affluence is one obvious answer. Vista might mean the visitor has a new computer. It may also mean they’re just early adopters, which again may signal affluence. Apple users tend to have higher incomes as well (at least according to some surveys).

As you may expect, I also found that the higher the screen resolution, the better the buyer. Even more interesting was the insight that widescreen aspect ratios (16:9) had the best rates of all. At the moment, most widescreen monitors are attached to shiny new laptops as opposed to desktops (though this is changing).

Can we infer that laptop users buy more? And if so, why?

The browser question drove similar results… IE7 beat out IE6 by a wide margin (even though visitors were even). Firefox beat them both.

So what do you do with this data?

You dig deeper and you test. These aren’t small scale tests either.

In the case of Vista vs. XP, we’re talking about more than 60% of all visitors to the site. You may find that IE6 has a lower conversion because something is actually broken on the site. If you try out different resolutions, you might find that your site is easier to navigate at higher resolutions.

Geek out aside, I’m talking about large audiences with a clear differences in response. These are segments worth investigating. You may be leaving enormous amounts of money on the table, or perhaps it is just walking out the door.

Rally with your designers and developers, test and QA. Champion their ideas, and you just might find that next campaign hidden amid the most boring data in your analytics package.

Oh, and lest you think I’m biased on the side of big, shiny Macs, stayed turned for the next installment on browsers and screen resolutions – Why Bigger Isn’t Always Better, Long Live the CRT.