Calling WordPress Externally, a few problems

I’m trying to call WordPress functions on an external page. I’ve been able to get rid of the first hurdle which had the error of:

This Plugin Requires WordPress 3.1+ or Greater: Activation Stopped!

By literally disabling everything on my site.

Now I am facing another little issue.

I’ve added this requirement statement: <?php require(‘/path/to/my/wp-blog-header.php’); ?>

And I get the following error. Of course this requirement statement is outside of any class.

Fatal error: Call to a member function main() on a non-object in /home2/phanime/public_html/wp-includes/functions.php on line 781

I’ve also looked around before asking, and people said to add the following line: global $wpdb; and it didn’t help, the error still persists.