I had a problem with Peachtree today and after some head scratching I managed to come up with the solution so I thought I’d make a post about it. The error occurs when you try to open up one of your existing companies. A dialog box appears that says “This is not a valid Peachtree company.”

Nearly everything I read said it was a problem with the attributes on the folder containing the company files. I spent too much time following that advice and it ended up being a deadend. The real solution was a corrupt (or in my case, missing) file called VERSION.TXT in the company directory. I simply took the VERSION.TXT file found in the directory for the sample company that comes pre-installed with Peachtree, copied it into the directory for the company that wouldn’t open and everything was good to go.

This problem happened on a copy of Peachtree Complete Accounting 2007 but I’d bet it will solve the same problem on any version of the software.

It’s worth taking 45 minutes to watch this video of the guys from skinnyCorp giving a great presentation on the success of Threadless. It will probably be the most useful for people who run community driven sites, but there’s good advice in here for everyone.

Now that the Facebook Platform has officially taken off there is a brand new market forming for web developers.

A quick look around and you’ll find lots of people looking to hire you to develop Facebook apps that will help feed the biggest spamming opportunity the web has seen since the advent of MySpace bulletins. These people aren’t offering decent rates, probably want offshore workers and should be avoided.

There is, however, some interesting movement being made in regards to selling Facebook Applications after they get a fan base. I first noticed this the other day when browsing Web Auctions Daily. There’s no clear model for monetizing these things so their value appears to be based on the size of their user base. Larger companies are beginning to scoop up applications made by independent developers that have high user numbers.

For a web developer between projects, or looking for a change of pace, making a Facebook Application might be worth looking into especially if you can get into a new niche early enough to attract a large number of users.

We provide web hosting and email services for roughly half of our web site clients at the moment. Now and again I’ll get questions from other web developers asking me what hosting provider we use and I always recommend the same one.

The best hosting solution for clients, and the one I always recommend you use, is whatever host the client currently has.

If a business is happy with their current web hosting and/or email provider there is no reason to switch unless there’s a valid technical limitation with the current setup. Isn’t that throwing money away though? Absolutely.

Email administration, for a web development business the size of our own, is the biggest time sink with the smallest return. Trust me when I say that the money you’ll earn through hosting will never equal the time and effort you’ll invest in providing tech support for email administration alone.

What if you need to take over web hosting and email in order to get a new client? The sites we’ve built and maintain are small enough that we can use one of the popular shared hosting providers like DreamHost or Media Temple. Most people either love or hate both of those companies and they both have had and will continue to have their ups and downs. In the end, they’re both pretty even. For a reasonable price, they offer great hosting options for small web developers.

A client recently bought a brand new digital camera and wanted to have a quick and easy way to resize the photos and make them more suitable for email.

Luckily, Microsoft has released a series of small programs for XP that they have strangely named PowerToys. One of these PowerToys is built exclusively for resizing images. After you download and install the program you’ll be able to instantly resize any image on your computer by right clicking the file and selecting “Resize Pictures” from the menu.

You’ll be presented with a selection of image sizes (or you can define your own) and when you are ready the PowerToy will make a resized copy of your original image in the same directory. You can resize multiple images by selecting multiple files and going through the same process.

For a web developer, if your client doesn’t have access to an image editing program or any interest in learning how to use one, the Image Resizer PowerToy is a great way for XP users to avoid a little heartache in preparing web-ready images.