If I’m working away on my Wordpress blog and I’m in the admin area, I would want to stay focused on what I’m doing. The Blog Stats area hosted by Wordpress.com has a feature I find gimmicky and distracting, and that can be a bit of a problem for some. This is the Random Hot Post, and most people familiar with it know that whatever’s on is usually not that hot (or random) to them. Personally I find it too much of a distraction and tend to click anyways regardless of how little I care what Lady Gaga is doing, or what someone has seen on his daily trip to town. Post plugs are fine if they’re on someone else’s blog, but in my admin area? Not a chance.

You pretty much can’t do anything to keep Wordpress.com from calling out the function to load the post bar, but ah- you can still mess with it on your browser’s end. Taking matters in my own hands, I wrote a very simple Greasemonkey script that will chuck that random post link away, at least as quickly as the page loads. Incidentally, the script also removes the entire WP bar, not just the link. And I’m providing the script for every Wordpress user.

Download No Random Hot Post!

This wouldn’t have been very plausible to do as a Wordpress plug-in, because the stats page loads on the Wordpress site and not your blog. Also, such a plug-in would require multiple installs for multiple blogs. If you have Firefox and have the Greasemonkey add-on, you can use the script right away. If you don’t have Greasemonkey, download that first so that you can use the script properly…otherwise the script will not install as intended.

Now you will have no trace of WP advertising or post whoring in your blog’s back end. Hopefully I would have made some bloggers’ lives a bit more productive.

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