So, I plugged in my iPhone into the Mac in order to recharge the battery today, and was asked to upgrade to the new 4.0 OS (which I had previously Ok’d for download).

What the hell, I’ve got a few minutes before I have to run … And Apple’s been pretty good about seemless updates, right?

Wrong.

About 20 minutes later, I get the notification that the phone cannot be used because iTunes is out of date.

WTF?

And sure enough, the phone is dead as a doornail – it can make emergency calls, and that’s it.

At the very least, iTunes could have checked the required version BEFORE attempting to update the phone and killing the device. That’s basic update 1.0.1 … check to make sure the requirements have been met BEFORE you attempt an update.

The real problem here is that my confidence is shaken … if they (Apple engineers) can make that kind of simple mistake, what else has been overlooked?

I’m moving to a Droid Incredible as soon at comes in (it was orderd on Father’s day) … not because of Apple, but because of AT&T’s crappy service – but this hairowing experience has me just as glad to be on a phone that isn’t tied to (literally) iTunes.

So, between 2 kids softball games and Jacky’s party tonight, All while doing my own product launch, I have to somehow find time to upgrade iTunes and try a reinstall …

(I’m writing this post while iTunes is doing downloading)

Point: beware of this update, and upgrade your OS and iTunes, FIRST.

I’ve just finished the integration of Marketing Website Generator into iContact. You can read more bout it at the Intellispire blog.

If you’re familiar with Tolkien’s Middle Earth, then you
know what a hobbit is.

They have a special place in my heart because as a child,
I was told I was too slow to be able to read.

But eventually I spent my reading time devouring The Hobbit
and The Lord of the Rings.

So, you could say, Hobbits helped teach me to read.
(along with my parents, thanks Mom & Dad)

Hobbits also have another strange custom I enjoy … when it’s
their birthday, they give gifts to all their friends.

And, guess what? Today’s may birthday!

So, for this weekend only, I’ve acquired a special report
that you can download as my birthday gift to you.

http://www.nicktemple.com/birthday/

No, I’m not really a hobbit, but I do love the creatures
and I think we can all learn a lot from their kindness
and love of life.

Have a great weekend.

Nick

P.S.: In case you are curious, I was able to build
out that complete site in a hair less than 3 hours -
from downloading the product to writing this email,
using the MWG.

About a year ago, I made a post talking about a Joomla plugin I created to connect Joomla! to Cloudfront.

You can read the full post here:
http://www.nicktemple.com/2008/206/cloudfront-plugin-for-joomla.html

After many requests, I decided to release the system under the GPL, and make it available to all for free.

The system needs some work: specifically in the areas of support for CSS files, features, and documentation.

You can download the code from subversion on Google Code. Support is provided only through the linked Google group however I may be available for implementation consulting on large projects – contact Intellispire if you are interested.

I have some open source software you can

download that helps you to build marketing
based websites.  Details momentarily.

We’ve just released the Software Installer for
Joomla!, 1.5.1 beta 1.

This fixes some problems with hosts that have
turned off the posix extensions, which we use
for determining whether or not files are
writeable during upgrade.

However, there may still be some issues on
some hosts.  Please download & test:

http://www.intellispire.com/web/component/option,com_kunena/Itemid,205/catid,31/func,view/id,26/

Please let us know if it works (or doesn’t) for you.

We’ll make it generally available once we’ve confirmed
the fix.

Also, you may have heard of Mike Filsames’ Butterfly
Marketing website building software is now
open source under the GNU/GPL license.

Exercising the rights under the GPL, we’ve re-built
the software as the Marketing Website Generator
software, just like Joomla! was orignally Mambo.

You can download a copy of MWG from our marketing
site:

http://marketingwebsitegenerator.com/

It isn’t as polished as Joomla!, and is used for a different
purpose. There are offers of support and extra extensions
along the way, which I encourage you to seriously consider.

Thanks,

Nick

For the last couple of years, I’ve been doing virtually all of my development on an Amazon EC2 server I’ve called “the forge”.

In order to make sure my backup system was 100%, I just “tested” having a catastrophic failure. I brought up a new instance, cloned the EBS volume (disk), and switched the elastic IP.

New server, identical to the first.

Total time? Less than 5 minutes, and absolutely zero detectable downtime (I’m sure there was a few seconds during the elastic IP switch).

Now, for the second time, I feel reluctant to “terminate” the instance of the server that has served so faithfully for nearly a year:

16:43:23 up 298 days, 18:36, 2 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00

And, again, I re-iterate – I’ve never had a hardware solution (shared or dedicated) from any hosting company that has been as reliable as the “virtual” servers from amazon – nor any that I could replicate and get back up so quickly in the event that there was a failure.

Good work Amazon!

I have an old P4/3.4Ghz tower that has been (up until this point) running Fedora Core 8. One thing I have never been able to do is to get the Linksys wireless networking card running.

Since I need to rebuild it for the kids anyway (they are all hot on learning how to really work on the Internet), I thought I’d try Ubuntu as it was recommended by a friend.

The first problem I had was the install media … after burning and trying 3 different CD’s, each one had multiple errors when I tried to install.

What’s really weird is the erors came up in different places (same disk, different reboots).

This could be the media itself (Memorex), the burner or the reader … I don’t actually know.

What DID work, however, was buring the CD ISO to a DVD instead … first time worked wonderfully, and ubunty came up quickly and without a hitch.

Getting the wireless card running is still not happening, however. ndiswrapper says hardware is present, and modprobe says that ndiswrapper is installed, but still no wlan0 to fiddle with.

I’ve been futzing with hardware most of the evening (after we returned from Six Flags), and am putting it away for now. It may just require a reboot … but given that I’m running from CD (DVD) that’s not an option. I’ll need to find a way to do some sort of “soft reset” that doesn’t dump the ramdisk.

IF I can get this card working, then I’ll switch to Ubuntu permanently and let the kids have at it …

Anyone have any clues?

I’ve had a few requests that I port the Intellispire Auto-Responder products I’ve created for Joomla! over to WordPress. I’m still unsure though – will people using wordpress use plugins for auto-responders?

You can find a complete list of autoresponder products here.

Let me know what you think – should we port? Or spend the time adding more options (AutoResponse Plus, Constant Contact, MailChimp … any others?)

Traditionally, Internet “niche” marketing has been traditionally taught in the following manner:

• Create a “free” report
• create a “squeeze” page that captures a prospect’s name and address, and in return, the free report is provided.
• on the “back end” you sell the product you really want the prospect to purchase.

The above may be an oversimplification, and there are many variations … but in the end, what you end up with is a email list with a lot of barely-qualified people on it.

Two things at Ryan Lee’s Continuity Summit has me questioning this sales method.

The first was Russel Brunson’s presentation, where he shows that providing a very low cost CD actually increases conversion.

In this case, you end up with a very qualified list of people that actually are willing to pay for information. But more importantly (in my mind), the conversions of the back-end offer were tested to be two-times that of sending a prospect directly to the sales page.

(I think more testing could – and should – be done, but the results are encouraging)

The second presentation was Stephen Pirece, who shows how to start making sales directly with a five step process that gets qualified traffic to just about any offer. Russel also us upteen (60? More?) ver different methods to get offers in front of traffic (and some of them are quite ingenious).

You see, originally getting a “big list” was necessary so that marketers could send traffic to various offers. But now, there are so many alternative ways of getting offers in front of people that are already online, email marketing just simply isn’t as attractive of a traffic source as it once was.

Maybe I should qualify this a little: CUSTOMER listbuilding is NOT dead. What may be on its way out is listbuilding for list building sake: free reports, for example, where all you can do is hope the person on the other end is a live, human, prospect.

Having a CUSTOMER list (those people who have actually purchased from you, vs. “just interested”) is another matter entirely.

A corollary to this theory becomes: listbuilding may not be your most valuable skill, and “not having a list” may no longer mean doom to your business. The “my list is bigger than yours” pants-pulling-contests really don’t mean squat.

The real skill is getting your message in front of people – or “traffic building”.

With good traffic skills, you can easily build any list.

Do you agree? Disagree? Let me know below.

Savannah and I are at Ryan Lee’s first ever Continuity Summit. We’re there promoting Joomla! as the membership software of choice as well as our own Easy Membership sites. You can keep updated on twitter or from our special page set up just for the event.

The easy membership sites website is currently in pre-launch, and open to new subscribers … it’ll just take a few days to deliver the software and setup because all the automation isn’t quite done yet.