I’ve searched for a simple way of disabling those feeds, plugins etc. stuff the Wordpress Dashboard tries to fill but it seems you can’t disable these from the backend. But there’s a quick way for doing this which involves editing your /wp-admin/index-extra.php and uncomment some lines there. This will leave your Dashboard intact while it stops Wordpress from connecting to various sources to screw your blog up when you just want to quickly write something.

So open your /wp-admin/index-extra.php file. It should look like this:

<?php
  require_once('admin.php');
  require( 'includes/dashboard.php' );
  require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
  @header('Content-Type: ' . get_option('html_type') . '; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'));
  switch ( $_GET['jax'] ) {
  case 'incominglinks' :
    wp_dashboard_incoming_links_output();
    break;
  case 'devnews' :
    wp_dashboard_rss_output( 'dashboard_primary' );
    break;
  case 'planetnews' :
    wp_dashboard_secondary_output();
    break;
  case 'plugins' :
    wp_dashboard_plugins_output();
    break;
  }
?>

Now just uncomment the lines so it looks like this (every line with two leading // is uncommented and therefore inactive):

<?php
  require_once('admin.php');
  require( 'includes/dashboard.php' );
  // require_once (ABSPATH . WPINC . '/rss.php');
  @header('Content-Type: ' . get_option('html_type') . '; charset=' . get_option('blog_charset'));
  // switch ( $_GET['jax'] ) {
  //
  // case 'incominglinks' :
  //  wp_dashboard_incoming_links_output();
  //  break;
  //
  // case 'devnews' :
  //  wp_dashboard_rss_output( 'dashboard_primary' );
  //  break;
  //
  // case 'planetnews' :
  //  wp_dashboard_secondary_output();
  //  break;
  //
  // case 'plugins' :
  //  wp_dashboard_plugins_output();
  //  break;
  //
  // }
?>

And that’s it. Save the file on your server, log in to your Wordpress backend and you should see your Dashboard with everything intact. It just won’t search for incoming links and all those other RSS sources anymore.

Remember that every update of Wordpress will overwrite this file.