I don’t know if this applies to the latest-and-greatest 2.0.x version of WordPress (I haven’t upgraded from 1.5, and don’t intend to until/unless I have to), but for me, the Dashboard page in the administrative backend has been only partially loading. The aggregated Planet WordPress links, that normally are delivered onto everyone’s Dashboard via a feed, haven’t been rendering for the past few weeks.

At first I figured I wouldn’t miss them. Despite their nominal role as informal newsbites from around the WP development world, I found a bunch of the posts to be irrelevant. Plus, it would occasionally lag, and thus slow down the entire page’s loadtime. In fact, I wonder if the general site slowdown I experienced last month wasn’t a symptom of this (somewhat doubtful, although I noticed that most of the problem then were occuring in the backend pages).

I figured there was a problem from wordpress.org’s end, and if killing their feed (it’s currently coming up as an error page) was their solution, so be it.

But lately, I found myself missing one site in that aggregation: Weblog Tools Collection. It doesn’t exclusively cover WordPress stuff, which actually is good. I’ve found a few useful tidbits via the site over the months.

So, I figured I’d get the Dashboard looking pretty again, and get my Weblog Tools Collection fix at the same time. I simply opened up the index.php file under the wp-admin directory, deleted the Planet WordPress URLs, and typed in the WTC-only feed. Pretty simple, and I figured it was also less fraught with potential flubs than deleting the entire feed-delivery code instead.

Obviously, you could sub in any feed into the wp-admin/index code. So if you’re brave enough to tinker, go for it.