One of the things I like about my job is that I’m always learning new things, sometimes from my clients. Recently, Love in the Suburbs emailed me with a request I’d never gotten before. When she commented on Blogger.com sites, she wanted her name to link to her web site, not to her Blogger profile. I started to reply telling her that you couldn’t do that, because let’s be honest, Blogger.com’s comments are kinda grody. But I decided to be diligent and research the idea before rejecting it. I went to the first popular Blogger site I could think of that would have lots of readers, Cake Wrecks, and browsed through a hundred comments left on a recent post.

Guess what I saw?

That’s right, you can have your name link to your personal blog in Blogger comments. The simplest way I found to achieve this was to use a service called ClaimID, a service that interacts with the Open ID system. According to their web site, “OpenID allows you to use an existing account to sign in to multiple websites, without needing to create new passwords.”

Setting up your Claim ID account

First you need to register for a Claim ID account using a fairly simple registration form.

They’ll send you an email with a link you can click to verify your account. It will send you to this welcome page that includes lots of helpful links, but the one we’re interested in will help you “quickly set your blog or website up as an OpenID.”

First, you’ll need to insert two lines of code in the header of your web site:

<link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://openid.claimid.com/server” />
<link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://openid.claimid.com/yourusername” />

Now, the next time you leave a comment on a Blogger site, select the Open ID option.

Then enter your website into the text field and click “Continue” and post your comment.

You’ll be asked to log into Claim ID with the account info you entered when you registered.

You’ll need to enter a nickname and full name, though it appears this info will not be displayed on your published comment. Then click “Log in and Trust” to authorize Claim ID to interact with Blogger about your account.

You’ll be routed back to the blogger site where you can verify and post your comment.

And there you have it!

Claim ID says there service also works on LiveJournal too, if you’re into that

Sometimes I get my nose so deep in my work I practically get boogers on my screen. Um, too much imagery for you there? Sorry. As a full-time freelancer, it’s important that I show off my latest projects so potential clients can take a look. But, it can be hard to find time to update the portfolio when I have another project pending, and I don’t particularly like bragging. I’m from the Midwest. We’re humble.

But, it’s late at night and I’m avoiding doing something else, so it’s a perfect time to show off my latest wares! Step right up and take a look!

Roni Noone

Roni Noone is a web publisher, healthy living blogger and social media fanatic (and I confess, a friend). It’s always fun to work with friends because I get particular pleasure trying to blow their minds with a great design. Yeah, working for money is great, but working to make your friends happy is a bonus.

Roni is preparing to leave her day job to blog professionally fulltime. (Rock on, Roni!) Although she’s a web developer herself, Roni was swamped with other work and didn’t have the time to design, code and launch her personal web page. Since this site would serve as a welcome mat for the rest of her online ventures, it was important that it be beautiful, professional and well built. She decided to entrust the site design to Make My Blog Pretty, because she knew we’d create a site that lived up to her high standards. Also, I got to say, it put particular pressure on me to make sure the coding for this site was flawless because I knew Roni would be taking a look under the hood. Some of the features we whipped up were:

• We created a rotating tag line in the header that fades in and out between multiple statements that reflect Roni’s many interests.
• The latest headlines and images from other blogs in Roni’s network appear as visual buffers and promotional links between posts.
• Roni is active on several social media sites, so we created a compact, floating media bar on the left side of the page that scrolls along with the user.
• Roni loves to respond to visitor’s comments, so we created a custom style that highlights her responses in the comment thread, making it easy for visitors to hone in on her comments.
• We collaborated with Roni on her site logo, creating an image that is professional but also reflects her sunny disposition.
• Upon Roni’s request, we made it easy to add new items to the menu while still incorporating a yellow sun background in the rollover state.

Roni was so happy with the design, that she immediately installed the theme only hours after receiving the files. She then announced the redesign enthusiastically on her multiple sites and twitter feed.

J. Maureen Henderson

A few months ago, J. Maureen Henderson hired me to design a home base for her professional identity. (Don’t say “personal brand” or she’ll smack you!) Maureen is a Generation Y expert, freelance writer and blogger. She provided me with several hi-resolution images, which really jump-started the design process. We collaborated on a post-it note motif in the design to reference the same image in the logo for her blog, Generation Meh, thus creating some visual continuity between the sites. It also allowed Maureen to include informational and playful notes about her identity in the header. The site is built in WordPress, which gives Maureen the ability to add and update her latest projects with ease. It was great working with a client who had a clear idea of what she wanted and provided high-quality materials to make it happen. I was really pleased with how the site turned out.

Other projects

I also pick up a lot of work making small updates to a few regular clients sites. Work like that, I don’t usually put in the portfolio. But in the past few months I’ve:

• Completed two WordPress database restorations
• Seamlessly transferred four sites, dozens of emails, and three databases to a new host
• Enabled a blogger to leave her web address as a link to her name on Blogger.com comments
• Lots of other stuff I can’t remember because it all starts to blur

Sometimes freelance web design work can be stressful because you have a dozen bosses and you want to please them all. But this past month has really been fun because I’ve gotten to work with some great people and learn new things as I’ve worked on their projects. Thanks, you guys! You make it worth it!

You rarely ever want to be in a crash, be it a car crash, a market crash, or a blog crash. But if you are, first is covered by car insurance, the second is covered by the media, and the third is covered by me.

Recently, I had a client who needed to restore two blogs after her server crashed a few months prior. The server was home a personal site and a popular television fan site. A backup of both blogs exited, but due to various issues, she wasn’t able to obtain those files right away. The personal blog was put on hold for the time being, but the television site needed to come back online right away. Being a tech savvy client, she set up a fresh WordPress installation on a new host and kept the television blog going until she got the backup files from the old server.

When the client contacted me to restore her old entries, I realized we’d have to take different approaches to how we restored each blog. The personal site didn’t have any new data since the crash, so the simplest approach was to just restore the database for that blog. The television site required me to merge the old data (which included posts, comments, links, and tags) with the new data.

Not as simple as it looked. (The trouble with prefixes.)

The personal site sounded like an easy fix, but of course it wasn’t. The client had tried restoring the personal site’s database herself, but when she went to her blog she was faced with the WordPress installation screen instead of the posts and comments she expected. At this point she decided to call me for help.

I took a look at the database using PHPAdmin and realized that the tables in her WordPress database were missing the “wp_” prefix that is used by default. You can adjust the settings in the wp-config.php file to use whatever prefix you choose on your tables, or to get rid of the prefix completely, which appears to be what happened here.

To solve the problem, you can do one of two things. You can edit the wp-config.php file so there is no prefix. Or you can add the prefix to all the tables, as well as make edits to some values in the wp_options and wp_users tables as described here. Once I made the adjustments, the site was back up and running like it had been before. Plus, I got to feel like a magician!

Merging the old blog with the new

Next, I had to take on the trickier blog restoration. First, I set up a fresh WordPress installation on my development site and hooked it into the database the client provided me. The database was rather large, so I used Big Dump to import it quickly. I then I opened PHPAdmin and edited the site address in the wp_options table to match the address of the development blog. Then I was able to log into the site using my client’s old credentials. (NOTE: If you try viewing the WordPress blog at this point, you’ll probably see a blank screen because the template selected in the database doesn’t exist in your WordPress installation. Select a different theme and then you’ll be able to see the site.)

From there, I exported the blog using WordPress’s built-in export tool under Tools -> Export. This created a huge XML file of all the posts, comments and tags that I could import to the newer version of the blog, thus merging all the information. The XML file was a rather huge 60mb, which would most likely cause WordPress to timeout if I tried uploading it all at once. So I used WordPress splitter to divide it into 5mb files instead. Late that night, when web traffic was lighter, I imported each of the XML files into the client’s current blog. For a finishing touch, I exported her old WordPress links and imported those into her site as well. The process took about an hour to complete, but all her data was restored.

All’s well that ends well

The client was very happy with the end results. I was glad that I knew two different ways to restore WordPress blogs and knew which one fit each situation best. A straight-up database restoration is by far the quickest way, when it works, taking only a few minutes instead of the hour the XML import required. However, if you’re uncertain of your database’s integrity, like you might be if your site had been hacked, the XML import is a safe way to go too. The XML import doesn’t allow you to import any of your plug-in settings and other general settings though, which is another downer. I hope you never have a server crash, but if you do, hopefully you’ll now know how to recover from one.