Web Dev Blog

Looking for help with WordPress, Apache, Vim, Web Security and more. Here are a few tips.

Category: Featured

Using Google Multiple Accounts to make Analytics easier

I’ve had a dilemma for a while. I have two google accounts. One has my google reader setup and some of my analytics. The other, setup with my business email address gave me access to clients Analytics accounts.

I’ve struggled with this for a while, logging in and out of both of my google accounts continually, until yesterday. Google, for the last year, has had a multiple account sign-in feature. Multiple accounts can be added and switched between easily.

Initially I didn’t think this was going to help, it doesn’t support Analytics, but it does support Reader and Gmail. So now, I login with my business Analytics account, but can quickly switch to my personal account when I’m in Reader and Gmail. No more logging in and out to see customer’s analytics.

Using Akismet with Contact Form 7 (CF7)

This is an issue I’ve run into multiple times, and I have to search for it every time, so thought I would share it here. You can use the AWESOME Akismet to filter spam on contact forms in WordPress that use Contact Form 7.

Next, add the following Akismet-related options into the appropriate fields in your form.

akismet:author
Add this option to the field that accepts the name of the sender.
Example: [text* your-name akismet:author]
akismet:author_email
Add this option to the field that accepts the email address of the sender.
Example: [email* your-email akismet:author_email]
akismet:author_url
Add this option to the field that accepts the URL of the sender.
Example: [text your-url akismet:author_url]

And the most important tip:

If Akismet judges the submission as spam, Contact Form 7 cancels the sending of mails and shows a message that says, “it failed to send the message.” You’ll see an orange border around the response message when it has been judged as spam.

Visit the Contact Form 7 blog for more info.

Disable Chrome QuickSearch for Google

I’ve been using Chrome a lot. Why you ask? Mostly because it works really well on my Ubuntu workstation. Getting Flash and Firefox to play nice together under Linux has been a challenge for years, but Chrome doesn’t seem (at least so far) to have problems like that.

There is one big annoyance I have with Chrome though, QuickSearch. When you type a search term that starts with Google into the URL bar Chrome automatically goes into this QuickSearch mode.

For example, I was going to search for the Google News Archive today (another project Google is shutting down that I hadn’t ever heard of). I typed “Google News Archive”. Chrome conveniently, because the term started with ‘Google’, put me into a search mode labeled ‘Google QuickSearch’. The result of my query? Just a search for ‘News Archive’.

The funny thing is, Chrome searches with Google by default. You can use other terms for QuickSearch, like wp (wikipedia), e (ebay), z (amazon), g (google again??? What’s the difference between this and Google QuickSearch??) etc..

It’s not too difficult to change this irritating behavior. Just go to Preferences->Basic, under Search click Manage Search Engines. The first entry in the Other Search Engines section is Google QuickSearch, just delete it and you will be able to once again search for terms that start with Google