are you with me?

I’m going to write a short post on the importance of small business owners to get their own business email addresses. The use of free email services are great as they have a lot of space and they can be accessed from anywhere fairly easily. However, I find them completely unprofessional. All channels of your communications with your prospective clients and customers must have your brand. This goes for everything including your website domain and your email addresses.

Nothing makes me more skeptical of a companies ability to deliver on their business promises than looking at a company with a 3rd-party email address or a hosted sub-domain. Im not saying that business that use these 3rd-party services are shady places. I’m saying using these services as your primary internet communications channels gives a bad impression, and impressions are everything (especially first ones).

Domain registration and web hosting aren’t very costly anymore, you can register a domain for about $15.00 CDN a year, maybe cheaper, depending on where you look. And web hosting, can be as cheap as a couple of dollars a month. I am going to recommend the web host that I have been using for the past two years. ReliableSite.net has been fantastic and I personally have not had any issues with their service. Their plans are customizable, and their rates are incredible. So please do yourself a favor, check out ReliateSite.net and drop your free email service.

A while back I received an email from Apple informing me that iTunes connect, that application to manage app on the App Store, would be down from December 23rd to the 28th. At first I puzzled why they would need to close a web app for such an extended period of time. Then after a while of thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that they must be doing system upgrades and maybe this site would get a much needed face lift. For as design oriented as apple is, this site looks like it was designed by accountants with frontpage (no offense to accountants).

After waiting patiently, I awoke on the 28th and tried to log in. Well it seemed that it was not 9:00 am at the center of the universe, also known as Cupertino, and access to the website was still denied. So again I waited patiently until after lunch. Finally at about 1:00 pm EST, I was able to log into my account and visit what i was hoping to be the newly renovated site. Well I was sadly disappointed, nothing had changed, other that it being incredibly slow because like myself, every other iPhone developer was logging in to see their app sales from the last 5 days.

So, even though I don’t know why iTunes connect was down for 5 days, I can only speculate the the app reviewers needed some much needed vacation, and the only way to ensure that they wouldn’t have an enormous backlog of apps to approve after the holidays, was to just to close the gates.

After being thoroughly disappointed by iTunes connect, i decided that I would head over to iTunes and see if there was anything new with the App Store its self. Well lo and behold, something is different. Now I cannot point out all the differences between the new layout and old, but the one thing that I did notice is that the description and screen shots have been moved. The description only shows the first line unless you click the more link. And the screen shots are HUGE. I must admit, that I do like this new layout. When making my decisions on App Store purchases, I more often than not, use the screen shots to make my decisions.

Well, hopefully now with the new layout, Developers will take extra care when choosing their screen shots because this is more than likely the only thing potential customers will see.

Well today I decided with a little time on my hands i would install Wordpress 2.9 using the five minute installation guide. Currently my webhost has an  application quick install for Wordpress, however its at version 2.1.

The instructions for the install were clear and everything seemed to go smoothly until i tried to navigate to the blog, that is were i got this message

Failed opening required ‘./wp-blog-header.php

In my case anyway, the cause was in the index.php file that references the wp-blog-header.php as

require(‘./wp-blog-header.php’);

but should be

require(‘wp-blog-header.php’);

I hope this helps others who may run into the same problem

Chris.