WIREDGORILLA

A top bar email sign up is a nice way to boost your opt-ins without being overly obnoxious. Especially with the current trend toward one column blogs, without a sidebar, it’s a great solution for making an opt-in prominent without being an eyesore. I wanted to add a top bar email opt in to a site and was prepared to have to research and test a few plugins, maybe fiddle with some styles and generally sink a little bit of time into the whole endeavour. However I was able to get the job done in less than 15 minutes thanks to a couple of simple plugins.

Ever raised an eyebrow at some of the sites showing up as Referrals in your Google Analytics reports? Analytics spam is a pervasive problem. There are 2 primary kinds of spam data you’ve probably seen show up in your Google Analytics reports. In some cases you may not have even realized it was spam.

There’s spam sites that show up in your referrer reports, and there’s spam that shows up in the browser language report. This post describes how to deal with both kinds of spam so that you can enjoy clean Analytics data! If you haven’t checked your Analytics for a while, I recommend doing so, to see if you’ve been subjected to any of the above.

Automattic’s Jetpack plugin has come a long way! It’s been much-maligned in the past for being bloated and slow and for that reason many developers wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot keyboard. These days it’s much better – it’s more truly modularized to give you more control over exactly what’s activated. From the code side of things, developers will be pleasantly surprised to discover that it has been sprinkled with lots of actions and filters. So, while Jetpack is still generally marketed to entry-level end users, there are actually some nice Easter eggs for developers who want to customize things a little bit for their clients.

This article provides some code snippets and examples of a few ways to customize Jetpack modules.