There is no cure and no other treatment available. And because I’m lazy I can sometimes go weeks without treating my eyes in the right way. This can lead to incredibly sore and tired eyes – not good for someone who stares at a screen for up to 10 hours a day!

For anyone out there in the same boat as me I offer these simple tips:

1. WASH YOUR EYES! Do it at least every other day. Even when they don’t feel like they need it, they do, trust me.
2. WASH – YOUR – EYES! (see point 1).
3. Use eye drops sparingly. Remember its your eye lids NOT the eye itself which is at fault. Eye drops work in the sort-term but they are simply combating the fact that your dry and inflamed eye lids are scraping away at your eye balls.
4. Get some Optrex ActiMist™ Eye Spray its not cheap at £15 per bottle but its really helps as a ‘quick fix’ before you need to use your eyes for driving or going to the cinema for example.
5. Blink, often. You need to BLINK a LOT to keep your eyes moist. Most blepharitis sufferers don’t blink as often as they should. My eye doctor told me I needed to FORCE myself to blink once every few seconds, every now and again. It really does help.
6. Take eye breaks – I play video games, work on a screen and watch TV for hours every single day. My eyes hate me for it. Taking a break to read something or just to rest your eyes is the best advice I can give – the only problem is I don’t follow it.

Of course, every blepharitis sufferer should know at least some of these facts. But if you are new to the condition OR if you aren’t taking the right actions for your symptoms then this advice should help.

Seriously – If you feel sleepy, depressed, stressed or worn down chances are its just the blepharitis kicking in. There have been weeks when I’ve simply let slip my treatments and have felt like I’ve suffered from a constant hangover with no cure. After a few days of treatment I feel anew, like I can SEE and THINK clearly again. Imagine one of those great mornings when you’ve had the BEST nights sleep ever and the sun is shining though the window.

Cheesy I know, but true.

Note: I am not a clinician or medically trained in any way. I’ve had this condition for almost 5 years now and I still suffer badly. Do not think any of these tips will cure you, they may not even help in more drastic cases.

The idea of the site was simple. I would open up a submittable form where users could come along, upload pretty album covers and then spend there days commenting and rating on the content to there hearts content.

Quick to market, quick to the grave

It didn’t take much work either. Built on WordPress (of course) with a modified free theme from the guys at WooThemes coupled with the TDO Mini Forms plugin meant I got things off the ground after about 2 days work (it also took about 3 hours to grab a few decent ’starter’ album covers and upload them of course, but this could be considered testing).

Once finished I ‘launched’ the site with a few tweets and word of mouth to some of my friends.

I also hoped that Google would do most of the legwork and send users trying to find album covers (for downloaded music) as I had stuck to all the recommended SEO tips for each item.

I hoped that building a small community would be easy, I thought.

The site would pretty much manage itself! I thought.

I could earn money from affiliate sales on iTunes and Amazon! I thought….

Hope is not a marketing tool

I was wrong, oh how embarrassing. Since its launch in June Cover Art Review has faltered.

In fact, it was pretty much DOA. There hasn’t been a single upload from a site visitor in months. The Google Analytics are frankly too embarrassing to bring up and the only comments are from a couple of friends who I asked to test the site for me!

The lesson here is simple. Community sites such as Digg, Reddit and smaller neich varients like Share A Logo! and DesignBump require a lot of care and attention. You can’t simply wash your hands of them once the coding is done and hope people will take up the responsibility of making the site work, you need to make sure they come back for more.

I treated Cover Art Review like it was a client project. I did the work then walked away only to come back months later and see I’d wasted my time.

And so..

Its not all bad. I still feel the site has merit and should be updated and re-marketed at some point. I’m just too busy to take it on right now.

And after a 2nd look at the market I doubt this site will ever reach the visitorship levels I hoped for, I just need to scale back my ambition before wasting more time on this.

Besides the site costs me nothing to run so I won’t be taking it down any time soon.

If anyone would like to know more or get invovled in the Cover Art Review site feel free to leave a comment…

It’s official: ‘Futurama’ is reborn!

Good news everyone! It seems after the success of the recent DVD movies Futurama has been given a 2nd (or is that 3rd?) lease of life

I couldn’t be happier. Futurama is on Sky1 every day and I’ve watched re-runs of the old shows so many times I can practically spout the scripts word-for-word.

The DVD movies which came out 2 years ago were a great addition to the Futurama family but I longed for the classic 20 minute punches that the TV show throws out.

Fingers crossed for HD

Looks pretty good. I can’t wait for v3.

Now, I’m not a HUGE widget user becuase they always seemed to be missing something. Looks like I need to get into them more with this release.

I still think that they need moving to their own Tab and away from the Appearance/Themes area.

Check your dashboard for automatic update now

www.base6design.com

Check it out, if you like what you see why not Get A Quote - also, check out the introductory blog post.

eeek!

Those of you with fast minds may notice that the new site has a blog section. What does this mean for THIS site? Well, sadly, I imagine quite a lot. The mkjones blog will remain, but its direction will move away from design, WordPress and certain Tech subjects and to more personal interest topics.

Fear not, the base6 blog will fill in any gaps. You can subscribe to the RSS here.

More Fields

This plugin has a really great custom field management interface. It allows you to easily create new content types such as “Reviews” or “News” that will sit alongside “Posts” and “Pages” in the WP menu.

If you feel the need you can also use this plugin to ’switch off’ the Posts/Pages WP menu options, therefore totally re-engineering the way in which WP can be used by content authors.

Custom Field Template

A somewhat simpler CMS-tool than More Fields or Flutter and unlike its counterparts the Custom Field Template plugin doesn’t have a user-friendly interface but it essentially does the same job.

The main advantage over its custom field brothers  is that Custom Field Template seems to ‘just work’. Yes its a little weird and yes most of the documentation isn’t in English but once you get past this it really is the simplest way to add new content fields to your site.

Recommendation

As ever, picking one of these tools I entirely dependant on your project. If I had to pick, and I will, the Custrom Field Template wins becuase of its pure simplicity and almost bug-less usage.

However, if you want to re-work the WP back-end further to your requirements More Fields may be more you cup of tea. Its certainly more Flutter-like.

So – until Flutter gets past BETA why wait? Both of these plugins will do a VERY good job of CMS-ing your site.

Nu Metal:

Seems pretty nice for a beta. Click here for more details.

EDIT: The audio seems to have gotten all screwed up on that first test. This one is from an FTP upload:

Eden:

(please don’t listen all way though, its quite embarrassing and I don’t want to waste my bandwidth) :-p

Its a bold idea, one that could work if the price is right (see end of post).

I’m all for the whole idea of downloading games rather than buying them in shrink wrapped DVD cases from a spotty geek in my local game store. But there are a couple of problems with the OnLine service which I believe will lead to its downfall.

Problems

The FIRST problem is how much this system seems to borrow from the fabled Phantom games console:

The Phantom was destroyed by the gaming media. Notably, Penny Arcade had a spat with them that almost ended in court.

If OnLive can’t come up with the goods quickly the gaming masses will turn on them. Simple.

A LOT of users will like this idea, love it in fact, if they have to wait and wait and wait for it they will give up, move on and flame OnLive for their broken promises.

The OTHER, much LARGER problem is that Microsoft, Sony and Nintendo already have a system in place that can pretty much destroy their business model overnight.

Game downloads on the 360 and PS3 are a great showcase of what could be done if game publishers allowed paid-for download of games. All they need to do is flip a switch and every 360 and PS3 user could start and get on-demand games as either a subscription or per-item.

The Wii is a little different due to its lack of hard drive, but this could be fixed with an add-on.

So. The real problem for OnLive isn’t that its a bad idea. Its just that it can’t compete with what is already available.

UNLESS its very, very, VERY cheap.

Check out these images:

Resized:

Cropped:

Overall the plugin is pretty seamless, in fact I’d say its almost perfect enough to be added to the WP core.

The brief was simple – add a pop-up which prompts the user to complete a survey, if the user declines or accepts store this action in a cookie so the pop-up never appears again.

Easy right? Well yes. I’ve done this a few times before, no problem.

This time however there was a problem. The cookie just wouldn’t ’stick’. By that I mean it was as if the pages on the site were just ignoring it. The pop-up was looping round, poping up all over the place no matter what the user had selected.

I re-wrote the code 3 times over 2 days – still the same issue. I tried everything from disabling all my plugins trying the site on multiple connections and different computers/browsers. All the same.

I knew the issue was something to do with the site cache. But nothing I did worked. Even with no plugins and no permalinks the site gave me no clue as to where I was going wrong.

And then I opend my .htaccess file.

Turns out a couple of weeks before I had left some code in the file from when I had been messing around configureing WP Cache

Something like this:

—————–.htaccess—————–
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{HTTP:Accept-Encoding} gzip
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html.gz [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !=POST
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*=.*
RewriteCond %{QUERY_STRING} !.*attachment_id=.*
RewriteCond %{HTTP_COOKIE} !^.*(comment_author_|wordpress|wp-postpass_).*$
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html -f
RewriteRule ^(.*) /wp-content/cache/supercache/%{HTTP_HOST}/$1/index.html [L]

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /index.php [L]
—————–.htaccess—————–

# BEGIN supercache

AddEncoding gzip .gz
AddType text/html .gz


SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.gz$ no-gzip


Header set Cache-Control ‘max-age=300, must-revalidate’


ExpiresActive On
ExpiresByType text/html A300

# END supercache

The above code was the problem. When I worked this out and removed it, the site worked file. Rather than being happy, I was pissed off. I mean, hours and hours of work. At one point I smacked down on my keyboard so hard some of the keys came off!

So, if you’ve ever messed around with WP Cache and your .htaccess file, please remember to remove all the settings when you are done. It will save you a lot of pain.