Tag Archive: Google

Google Meet Emoji Shortcuts

I was hoping to find an option for emojis in google meet for GSuite as when running larger meetings in Google Meet, it can be difficult to gauge real-time feedback as you are speaking.

A while ago I posted about all the emoji keyboard shortcuts for google hangouts chat. Unfortunately it turns out that Google Meet does not currently support emojis in text chat*

However… i have found a handy chrome extension which allows team members to send real-time emoji reactions, such as thumbs up, to presenters and speakers during meetings on Google Meet. (Similar to reactions in Zoom)

It’s called “Nod – Reactions for Google Meet

You can find it here: https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/nod-reactions-for-google/oikgofeboedgfkaacpfepbfmgdalabej or search the chrome webstore for it.

Hopefully this helps anyone also using GSuite and trying to get the most out of Google Meet.

If this helps you out please feel free to say thanks by clicking “Buy Me a Coffee” PayPal button in the sidebar (here) or via:https://www.paypal.me/AlanHart

Thank You

*at time of writing (24/04/2020)

WordPress xml sitemap noindex errors – Google Search Console (aka Webmaster Tools)

If you notice Google Webmaster tools console flagging up the following…
Error – Submitted URL marked ‘noindex’ for http://site.com/sitemap.html

You can easily prevent these HTML files being created by the “XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress” plugin.

This is NOT in your site’s robots.txt file but instead it’s a meta tag in all html sitemap pages generated by the plugin.
The only page Google needs is the sitemap.xml file these extra html files aren’t needed.

  1. Login to wordpress (ofc)
  2. Go to settings > XML-sitemap
  3. Find and un-tick “Include sitemap in HTML format”
  4. Make sure to apply the change by scrolling to the bottom of page and click [Update options]

This article is specific to “XML Sitemap Generator for WordPress” https://www.arnebrachhold.de/projects/wordpress-plugins/google-xml-sitemaps-generator/

If this helps you out please feel free to say thanks by clicking “Buy Me a Coffee” PayPal button in the sidebar (here) or via:https://www.paypal.me/AlanHart

Thank You

Google Hangouts Emoji Keyboard Shortcuts

Follow this link if you’re looking for the Windows Emoji Keyboard Shortcut.

I’ve been annoyed that i couldn’t find emoji keyboard shortcuts on Google Hangouts (on mobile or gmail in web browser), i was specifically looking for the thinking face emoji.

You can copy and paste from this list but keyboard shortcuts are so much easier

Naturally i did the geeky thing and tried to find it.

Here’s the geeky stuff…
The code for keyboard shortcuts is buried in a javascript variable “J7a”
To see the javascript yourself: make sure you have a hangouts chat open in gmail then…
right-click  > inspect > sources

Here’s a snippet of the javascript…
(more geeky stuff)
J7a={“!:)”:128579,”!:-)”:128579,”(=^..^=)”:128568,”(=^.^=)”:128568,”(N)”:128078,”(Y)”:128077, …
[REMOVED A CHUNK – THERE ARE A LOT OF THEM!]
…u_u:128532,x_x:128565,”}:)”:128520,”}:-)”:128520,”}=)”:128520,”~@~”:128169}

What you’re seeing there is each keyboard shortcut “:)” and the corresponding Unicode character in decimal.
e.g. 128053 is decimal for the hexidecimal value 0x1F435 (monkey face U+1F435) .

Here are the emoji shortcuts…
Without further delay, here’s the full list of all currently available Google Hangouts emoji keyboard shortcuts…

:C frowning/sad face 
(U+2639)
:) or :-) smiley 
(U+263A)
<3 heart 
(U+2764)
-<@% honeybee 
(U+1F41D)
:(|) monkey face 
(U+1F435)
:(:) pig face 
(U+1F437)
(Y) or (y) thumb up 
(U+1F44D)
(N) or (n) thumb down 
(U+1F44E)
(]:{ man with turban 
(U+1F473)
</3 or <\\3 broken heart 
(U+1F494)
~@~ pile of poo 
(U+1F4A9)
:D or :-D grinning face 
(U+1F600)
^_^ grinning face with closed eyes 
(U+1F601)
:”D laughing face with tears 
(U+1F602)
=D laughing face open mouth with happy eyes 
(U+1F604)
^_^;; laughing face open mouth with tear 
(U+1F605)
O:) or O=) O:-) angel face (smiley with halo) 
(U+1F607)
}:) or }=) or }:-) devil face 
(U+1F608)
;) or ;-) winking face 
(U+1F609)
=) blushing smile 
(U+1F60A)
B-) smiley with sunglasses 
(U+1F60E)
:, or :-, smirking face 
(U+1F60F)
:| or =| or :-| neutral face 
(U+1F610)
-_- expressionless face 
(U+1F611)
o_o; downcast with sweat 
(U+1F613)
u_u pensive face 
(U+1F614)
:/ or :\\ or =/
or =\\ or :-/ or :-\\
confused face 
(U+1F615)
:s or :S
or :-s or :-S
confounded face 
(U+1F616)
:* or :-* kissing face 
(U+1F617)
;* or ;-* face blowing a kiss 
(U+1F618)
=* blushing kissing face 
(U+1F61A)
:p or :P
or :-p or :-P
or =p or =P
face with tongue 
(U+1F61B)
;p or ;P
or ;-p or ;-P
winking face with tongue 
(U+1F61C)
:( or :-( or =( dissappointed face 
(U+1F61E)
>:( or >=( or >:-( pouting / angry face 
(U+1F621)
:'( or ='(
or T_T or ;_;
crying face 
(U+1F622)
>.< or >_< persevering face 
(U+1F623)
D: frowning with open mouth / worried 
(U+1F626)
:”( loudly crying face 
(U+1F62D)
:o or :O
or =o or =O or :-o or :-O
or o.o
face with open mouth / shocked 
(U+1F62E)
O.O astonished face / gasping with shock 
(U+1F632)
X( or X-( or
X-o or X-O
or x_x
dizzy face 
(U+1F635)
:3 or :X)
or =^_^=
or (=^..^=)
or (=^.^=)
grinning cat with smiling eyes 
(U+1F638)
!:) or !:-) upside-down face 
(U+1F643)
>:(X person gesturing no / crossed arms 
(U+1F645)
\o or o/ person raising hand 
(U+1F64B)
:)X or :-)X
or >:D<
hugging face / open hands 
(U+1F917)
\m/ hand horn sign / ‘rock-on’ 
(U+1F918)
V.v.V crab 
(U+1F980)

Annoyingly, as you can see in the list, my original search for a keyboard shortcut for the thinking face emoji proved fruitless…
There isn’t one  … yet

For reference here’s the current Unicode full emoji list.

I hope this helps you and saves you from diving into the javascript source!

If this helps you out please feel free to say thanks by clicking “Buy Me a Coffee” PayPal button in the sidebar (here) or via:https://www.paypal.me/AlanHart

Thank You

Stop multiple posts for shared YouTube videos and links appearing on Google Plus posts page

If you share lots of stuff via YouTube or Google Plus you may have noticed that your posts page on your google plus profile shows everything you share, everytime you share it.
This is fine if you only share something once but, if you share the same thing multiple times (on multiple sites/pages for example), then it will appear multiple times in your Google+ posts page, making it look a bit spammy.

Here’s how you can quickly and easily prevent this from happening….

  1. Go to your Google plus page
  2. Click “Home” in the top left
  3. Click “Settings”
  4. Scroll to the “Profile” section near the (bottom)
  5. Untick “Show your Google+ communities posts on the Posts tab of your Google+ profile”


Simple huh?

Hope this helped you. If it did please share on twitter, google plus, facebook etc or give me a little something towards my next caffeine fix by clicking the [Buy me a coffee] PayPal button in the sidebar!)

Sender’s email says it’s from/via my email address! – Google Apps / Gmail

I have many “Google Apps” accounts on domains.

Lets say one of these domains is “mydomain.com” for example…

There are regular gmail users under the same “Google Apps” account

For a long time I have used the “Google Groups” feature to have a group email address.

What’s  Google Apps Group?
If you don’t know (and let’s face it you probably do if you’re hear reading this) this is a feature which allows people to receive an email sent to a “Group” email address in their own inboxes.

e.g. Any email sent to the Google Apps Group email “appsgroup@mydomain.com” would go to the inboxes of three google accounts: alan@mydomain.com, ben@mydomain.com and carl@mydomain.com

In this scenario a “Google Group” is essentially just an alias address.

Recently (within the last few months) I have noticed that a few emails that have been sent to the appsgroup@mydomain.com group email address successfully arrive in the group members’ inboxes but with a From: header that looks like this:

From: ‘Someones name’ via AppsGroup [mailto:AppsGroup@YourDomain.com]
Reply-to: Real Sender <RealSender@AnotherDomain.com>

In other words, Google Apps/Gmail is making the email look like it’s coming from the appsgroup@mydomain email (i.e. myself!)

In certain versions of outlook you cant actually visually see the senders real email address and on iPhone this may cause the actual name of the sender to show up with your own name, since iPhone Mail pulls the name from it’s address book rather than from the email headers.

Originally I thought that the senders real email address was lost forever but it is actually in the headers.
You should be able to just hit reply and it will reply to the persons email

The problem arose for me because someone forwarded the email to me, thus stripping the original headers and therefore unable to see the original sender’s email address.

Why does this happen?
It turns out that Yahoo and AOL made changes to require mail providers that support the DMARC standard to reject all email from @yahoo.com accounts unless the mail actually originated at AOL and Yahoo’s servers. (Other providers have followed suit.)

If you have a Google Group / Alias address forwarding to a gmail account, it will rewrite the From: header as explained above if the provider sending the email has a strict DMARC policy like AOL and Yahoo. If they didn’t, the email may be rejected, depending on where it’s being delivered. (See the DMARC FAQ, where it looks like Google chose  option number 3).

It seems that the only way to fix this (i.e. prevent Google rewriting the header), is to remove your Google Group alias address, and replace it with an actual Google Apps user account you create with the same email address that you had for your Google Group alias. Then login to that new user account and set it up to forward mail  to your email address.

Of course this does mean if you pay for Google Apps users that you will need to pay for another user!

I had to explain this all the the friend in question and get them to reveal the original sender’s email address.

To see the email headers in Outlook:

Right-click on the email in question, and choose “Message options”
Scroll through the “Internet heaers” text box at the bottom and you will see the original sent from address:

Reply-To: Persons Name <person@email.com> or
X-Original-Sender: person@email.com
or
X-Original-From: Persons Name <person@email.com>

Google Chrome – Disable Recently Visited Sites in New Tab

Sometimes you don’t want (or don’t want anyone else) to see a list of the last few pages you have visited in chrome.

To default to a different view whenever you
At the bottom of a new tab there are two options “Most Visited” and “Apps”. If you click “Apps” Chrome will now default to the Apps page instead of the Recently / Most visited page whenever you open a new tab.

At the time of writing there is no way to actually disable this recently visited sites page / thumbnails but you can install a 3rd party plugin such as Incredible Start Page which allows you to customise the new tab page really well.

View Google Checkout sales and invoices after upgrade to Google Wallet

Logged on this morning to find that my Google Checkout account had been changed to Google Wallet.

Not a huge deal i thought, until i realised that i couldn’t access my sales and invoices etc.

Easy way around this is to type this into the address bar

http://wallet.google.com/sell

This will take you to the checkout seller tools for orders and payments.

Tweet me (@alanhart) if this helped you.

Google’s New Sitelinks

Sitelinks have been around for a while but used to look like this:
Old Style Sitelinks

Now they look like this!:
New Google Sitelinks for Microsoft
Within Google’s new search hierarchy, sitelinks will now be full-size links with a URL and a line of snippet text, similar to regular search results. But Google has also designated a maximum number of 12 sitelinks per search result, giving pride of place within the page to the first search result.

The changes will roll out globally to all modern browsers, including Chrome, Firefox, and Internet Explorer 7 and above, Google said.

Sitelinks are useful to users as they may not be able to specifically identify where in a site they want to visit, so he or she merely types in the overarching domain.

“It turns out that sitelinks are quite useful because they can help predict which sections of the site you want to visit,” Daniel Rocha, a software engineer on the Google Sitelinks team, wrote in a blog post. “Even if you didn’t specify your task in the query, sitelinks help you quickly navigate to the most relevant part of the site, which is particularly handy for large and complex websites. Sitelinks can also give you a good overview of a website’s content, and let webmasters expose areas of the site that visitors may not know about.”

Google has also said that it is tweaking its search algorithm to accommodate the changes. “In addition, we’re making a significant improvement to our algorithms by combining sitelink ranking with regular result ranking to yield a higher-quality list of links,” Rocha said. “This reduces link duplication and creates a better organized search results page. Now, all results from the top-ranked site will be nested within the first result as sitelinks, and all results from other sites will appear below them.”

Google Maps Streetview StoneHenge

I might be a bit slow on this but thought it was interesting enough to blog about.
Google have gone off-road with their StreetView camera and captured Stonehenge.

See stonehenge streetview below or View Streetview Stonehenge outside of the blog.


View Larger Map

Street View allows web users to view place as if walking along the street, exploring 360-degree images recorded from eye level.

But its cameras have also captured some embarrassing moments, including a man entering a sex shop and another being sick in the street.

The application allows users to access 360-degree views of roads and homes in 25 British towns and cities and includes photographs of millions of residential addresses, people and cars.

It has been hailed as a helpful tool for home hunters and tourists.