6 February 2009 3 Comments

How to remove the smiley face from a WordPress blog

So a little smiley face appears at the bottom of your blog, and it looks like this:

Well ain’t that the cutest thing! But what is it?

It’s the little .gif file that the WordPress Stats plug-in uses to monitor your page. It does so with some code like this…

1
<img src="http://stats.wordpress.com/g.gif?host=www.yoursite.com&rand=###############&blog=#######&v=###&post=#&ref=#" alt="" />;

…where the #’s are various characters. It’s all mystic WordPress voodoo which you don’t need to worry about.

Now I actually like the smiley face, but some people want to remove it from their blog. And it’s easy to do.

In wp-admin, head over to Appearance > Editor > style.css (or whatever your main style sheet is named). You then just add this bit of CSS:

1
2
3
4
/* Let's remove that Wordpress Stats Smiley Face ! */
img#wpstats {
     display: none;
}

There you have it! We’re just using plain and simple css to remove the smiley face from the screen, but still loading it so the page view gets counted.

So now you know how to remove the WordPress Stats smiley face. The question is, do you really want to?!

3 Responses to “How to remove the smiley face from a WordPress blog”

  1. Gleb Esman 11 February 2009 at 2:37 pm #

    Aren’t this suppose to do the trick? :

    Wordpress Admin -> Settings -> Writing -> Formatting -> uncheck [ ] “Convert emoticons …”

    Gleb

    PS: Great tuts on Jquery on your site…thanks!

  2. Rich 20 February 2009 at 10:20 pm #

    I think you’re confusing the smiley face that WordPress stats uses, which is an image file (http://stats.wordpress.com/g.gif), with the colon followed by a close parentheses which looks like this :)

    Although WordPress use an image of a smiley face, it could be an image of anything.

    Hope that make sense!

  3. Christopher Ross 25 March 2009 at 3:23 pm #

    Hi, I know it’s a simple thing to add the CSS but there are some people who can’t get to there CSS files or are uncomfortable doing it so I came up with a plugin that does basically what you’ve done here for them. http://www.thisismyurl.com/featured/free-downloads/wordpresscom-stats-smiley-remover-plugin/


Leave a Reply