In one of the new WordPress updates, its dashboard quietly shifted from its Technorati incoming links feed to the Google Blog Search. Judging by the absence of many talks on this matter, most users probably haven’t realized the changes yet. However, if you are watching your dashboard attentively, you could easily notice that the quality and frequency of inbound links are not the same now. Many people would prefer Technorati inbound links to the Google Blog Search. The main reason is that Technorati shows a better grip on the latest WordPress blogs, and that makes inbound links appear faster on your dashboard. Moreover, sometimes very late at night Google Blog Search feed goes absolutely blank like it has never been there, and it seems like you have no inbound links at all, which is at least frustrating.
Nobody knows why WordPress decided to make this change, and they didn’t mention it in its feature list either. Maybe they did it because they considered Google Blog Search to be a better provider of relevant incoming links as compared to Technorati. Probably, Google paid the WordPress team under the table to do that, who knows?
Still, the good news is that the developers made the opportunity to the users to change the dashboard, as they left it pluggable. If you need the details, the filter is ‘dash_feed_url’. You should probably say thanks to the developers for enabling it, because if they didn’t, you would have to hack the core index-extra.php file. Of course, it would be fine to make the change to the core /wp-admin/index-extra.php. The drawback is that after upgrading your WordPress, you’ll have to start all over again. If you don’t want to spend too much time and effort on it, you can get a plugin.
It was created by My Digital Life, and works by replacing the Google Blog Search’s links with the Technorati’s results. That’s a really good thing if you need it. The plugin is quite simple, containing less than ten lines of code, but it works perfectly.
The instructions for installing it are common: place the file of the plugin to your plugin directory, after doing than run it and go on – just make your own way over to the dashboard. You’ll be amazed at the results, as you will immediately notice the changes in the inbound link list. To get rid of the changes is very easy as well – when the time comes for you to shift back to Google Blog Search feed, all you have to do is just uninstall this plugin.
Post Tags: blog dashboard, dashboard, rss feed, wordpress dashboard, wordpress dashboard feed, wordpress feed, wordpress rss
