Applications like CCleaner on the other hand speed up the process significantly, especially if more than one browser is installed and used on the computer system. Another program with a very similar functionality is Browser Cleaner.

Browser Cleaner has been primarily designed to delete the Internet history of web browsers that are installed or in use on the system. The portable software program supports popular web browsers such as Internet Explorer, Firefox, Google Chrome and Opera.

The Options button next to each browser’s name opens a detailed configuration menu in which specific files or items can be selected for deletion. This includes the browser’s cache, history, cookies or download history.

Everything is selected by default which means that a click on Clean Now will delete the complete Internet history of all supported web browsers.

Browser Cleaner offers more than just the deletion of Internet files and traces. It supports deleting the history of Instant Messaging software programs and file sharing programs as well. Supported are more than ten programs in each category, from file sharing programs such as emule, iMesh or uTorrent to instant messaging programs like AOL Instant Messenger, ICQ, Yahoo Messenger or Google Talk.

That’s still not the end of it. The tabs Windows Items and Applications lead to additional locations and information that you can delete with the program.

Windows Items list a few dozen Windows locations, from the temporary files folder over log files to Windows Live Messenger Cache and History.

The Applications tab lists popular third party applications from companies like Adobe, Macromedia or AVG.

The selections are not as complete as in CCleaner, but they come very close. It is however missing some of the customization options of CCleaner.

Browser Cleaner can be handy for users who want to delete their computer’s Internet history with minimal effort. It takes just two clicks to do that with the application. The latest version of the program, compatible with all recent versions of the Windows operating system, is available for download at the developer website.

Probably the biggest weakness of Google’s Cache usability wise is that links on a cached page link to the original website and not that page’s cached version in Google Cache. If you want to read a linked page that points to the very same website that is down, you need to go back to Google and search for that content to access its cached version. Not very handy. Think of a forum thread with ten pages of content, you would have to go back ten times to read all ten pages.

That’s where the Google Chrome extension Google Cache Link Protector steps in. The extension converts all direct links pointing to other pages of the cached website to Google’s Cache, which basically means that you can navigate through Google’s cached version of the website directly.

The extension processes all links on the page and turns them into links pointing directly to the cache, provided that a cached version is available for that link. The link generation may take a moment though, it is noticeable but fast enough to not be a big distraction or slow down.

This way, you can navigate all cached pages of the website directly, without having to switch to the Google Search interface again to display another cached link of the site.

Google Cache Link Protector is a handy extension for the Google Chrome browser. It is available for direct installation over at the Google Chrome Extensions Gallery.

Before we start with explanations on how to clear a browser cache, we are going to look at the cache briefly. What is it? Why is it there in first place? The cache is a temporary storage on your computer. It is usually located on a hard drive but can be moved freely around, for instance to removable drives or even to the RAM. Page elements are stored in the cache whenever you visit a website. This is done to speed up the loading times on your next visit, or if you navigate to another page on the website.

A basic example. Say you view ten pages on Ghacks. Instead of having to download the static Ghacks logo ten times you only download it once from the server. The logo is loaded from cache when you open the other nine pages of the website. This saves bandwidth and connections to the server which speeds up the display of the website in the web browser.

The cache can be the source of problems as well. This is for instance the case if I change the Ghacks logo after it has been stored in your cache. Your browser may display the old logo even though a new one has been uploaded to the site. While it is usually not a problem for logos and such, it could very well be problematic if you get a “site maintenance” information which does not go away, even if your friends are telling you that they can access the site again.

That’s why it is important to know how to clear the browser cache. Unfortunately, it is a different procedure with every Internet browser. This guide covers the five popular browsers Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Safari.

How To Clear A Browser Cache

Internet Explorer 8, 9 and newer

• Click Tools > Safety > Delete Browsing History
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del
• Or, click Tools > Internet Options > Delete
• Or, open Start Menu, click Control Panel, select Internet Options > Delete

Make sure Temporary Internet Files is selected. A click on Delete clears the browser cache in Internet Explorer.

Mozilla Firefox 3.5, 4 and newer

• Click Tools > Options > Advanced > Network > Clear Now
• Or click Firefox > History > Clear Recent History
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del

Make sure Cache is selected in the options. It may also be switch the time range to everything to make sure that everything that is currently stored in the cache gets deleted.

Opera

• Click Menu > Settings > Clear Private Data

Make sure Delete Entire Cache is selected in the options before you click on the Delete button.

Google Chrome

• Click Wrench > Tools > Clear Browsing Data
• Or, press Ctrl-Shift-Del
• Or, load chrome://settings/advanced and click on Clear browsing data

Make sure empty the cache is selected before you click on the clear browsing data button.

Safari

• Click Safari > Empty Cache

Clearing the browser cache manually, Cache Locations

You can also clear the browser cache manually. It is usually not necessary but handy to know anyway.

Internet Explorer

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Temporary Internet Files
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Microsoft\Windows\Temporary Internet Files

Mozilla Firefox

• Windows XP: C:\Document and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\code.default\Cache
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\ Local\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\code.default\Cache
• Linux: /.mozilla/firefox/.default/Cache/
• Mac: ~/Users/username/Library/Caches/Firefox/
  Profiles/code.default/Cache

Google Chrome

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Google\Chrome\
• Windows 7, Vista: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Google\Chrome\User Data\Default\Cache
• Linux: ~/.cache/google-chrome
• Mac: ~/Library/Caches/Google/Chrome

Opera

• Windows XP: C:\Documents and Settings\username\Local Settings\Application Data\Opera\Opera
• Windows Vista, 7: c:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Opera\Opera\application_cache\
• Mac: Check Menu > Help > About Opera.
• Linux: Check Menu > Help > About Opera.

Safari

• Windows XP: c:\Document and Settings\username\Application Data\Apple Computer\Safari
• Windows Vista, 7: C:\Users\username\AppData\Local\Apple Computer\Safari
• Mac: ~/Library/Caches/Safari/

While it may be out of reach to fix the problem, it is usually possible to access the information through caches. All major web search engines maintain caches of websites in their index which they make partially or fully available to Internet users.

Google Search for instance displays a “Cached” link next to websites it has cached in its search results. A click on that link opens the page on Google at the time of the last indexation. This indicates that there may be differences in contents between the actual website and the cached copy of the search engine.

Firefox CacheMachine is a handy extension that adds options to open cached copies of links. Supported are the caches of Google, Bing and Yahoo at this point in time.

The extension adds an entry to the right-click context menu of links.

The cached copy of a website is loaded in a new tab if it is available. An error is displayed if no cached copy of the web page is offered by the selected search engine.

CacheMachine can be helpful in numerous situations. From accessing “older” information on a page, to retrieving information if a page or website is down and displaying information that are otherwise only accessible to registered users.

The Firefox extension is compatible with all Firefox 3 and 4 versions. It can be directly installed at the Firefox Add-on repository at Mozilla.com.

We have also covered tips to optimize Windows for Solid State Drives in the past which suggested among other things to move caches from the SSD to another drive.

That tip was problematic, especially for users with only SSDs connected to their computer.

A workaround for those users is to use a ram disk for caching purposes. Ram disks, sometimes also called ram drives, are storage devices that use computer memory to store the data.

This is obviously only a feasible alternative if the PC has enough system memory that can be spared for the ram disk. Any PC with three or more Gigabytes of computer memory should be able to run a ram disk for caching purposes.

This article covers the creation of the ram disk and explains how to move the cache from the SSD to the ram disk.

Windows users can select from a variety of Ramdisk applications. We have covered Ramdisk.sys in the past for instance but will use the Dataram Ramdisk software this time.

The free version of the program supports ramdisk up to a size of 4 Gigabytes. This is sufficient for moving the cache to the ram disk and for most other uses as well.

Start the Dataram RAMDisk Configuration Utility after installation. The tool is listed in the Dataram Ramdisk start menu entry.

ramdisk

The ram disk is configured in the Settings tab. The size, file system and boot sector settings can be defined in here. How much memory should you turn into a ram disk? That depends on the memory installed and the required size of the caching directories.. Users with four or more Gigabytes can use at least a One gigabyte disk.

One option to find out how much of the memory can be used is to open the Windows Task Manager by pressing Ctrl-Shift-Esc, switch to the performance tab and look at the physical memory section. Using half of the ram under the available section is usually a safe bet.

The file system can either be Fat16 or Fat32. Users who prefer NTFS or another file system need to select unformatted and format the disk in Windows after it has been created.

A click on Start RAMDisk will create the disk and assign a free drive letter to it.

ram disk

The f: drive in the screenshot above is the newly created ram disk.

The second step of the process is to configure the applications and operating system to make use of the ram disk by changing the cache directories to a location on the new ramdrive.

We give examples for the Windows temporary file folders, Firefox and Internet Explorer caches.

Windows Temporary Folders

The Windows temp directories are stored in the system’s environment variables. The easiest way to open the configuration window is by pressing Windows-Pause on the keyboard and selecting Advanced System Settings from the sidebar of the window that opens.

Locate the Advanced tab in System Properties and click on Environmental Variables. Here we have user variables and system variables.

environment variables

Candidates here are for instance the TEMP and TMP system and user variables. They can be edited by selecting each one of them and clicking on Edit. Simply enter the new path in the variable value field and leave the variable name as it is.

changing windows temp folder

Changing Firefox Cache

Open the Firefox web browser and type in about:config in the Firefox address bar. Enter browser.cache.disk.parent_directory in the filter field and double-click the parameter.

Now enter a location on the ram disk to make Firefox use that as the caching folder.

firefox cache location

Internet Explorer Cache

Open Microsoft’s Internet Explorer and click on Tools > Internet Options. The Internet Options are also accessible from the Windows Control Panel.

Click on Settings next to browsing history in the General tab and on Move Folder in the next window to move the temporary Internet Files folder to the ram disk.

temporary internet files

There is another benefit of using a ram disk for caching locations. The ram disk will automatically be cleared on shutdown which makes recovery of those caching files afterwards impossible (unless a snapsnot of the ram is taken shortly after shutdown).

Solid State Drives benefit from the reduced write operations and it might even speed up some operations marginally.

But that is not an elegant solution especially if the information on the website need to be accessed urgently. Several third party tools are available to troubleshoot connectivity issues. Some noteworthy ones are ping or traceroute that can provide the user with information why a website cannot be accessed.

There are also tools that can provide access to a website’s contents even if the site is not available. These caching solutions are offered by most search engines.

ErrorZilla is an extension for the Firefox web browser that displays troubleshooting and caching solutions on Firefox error pages.

The modified error page displays eight buttons that can be used to troubleshoot the connectivity issue and to display the contents of the website.

• Try Again: Will reload the website. Pressing F5 or the reload button in the toolbar of the browser has the same effect.
• Google Cache: Display the contents of the website if they are stored in Google Cache.
• Coralize: An alternative cache that can be used to display the contents as well.
• Wayback: Usually not as up to date as the other two caching options. Often used to see how a website looked in previous years.
• Ping: Use an online service to ping the website.
• Trace: Use an online service to trace the connection.
• Whois: Display information about the website registrar)
• Proxify: Use a previously configured web proxy to access the page.

All of the tools that are accessible on the modified error page can also be accessed without the tool. The main benefit of the Firefox add-on is the fact that it provides quick access to these tools which speeds up the troubleshooting process.

ErrorZilla is available at the Mozilla Firefox add-on repository.

The first part of this tutorial describes how to use a content delivery network in WordPress. It will detail the requirements needed to install the CDN properly. The second part will cover the configuration of the CDN in WordPress.

WordPress does not have options to enable a CDN, however plugins and third party tools can be used to enable that functionality. Here are the scripts and services needed to configure the content delivery network as we did here at ghacks.net:

• Install the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache. This plugin is probably the best caching plugin available for WordPress, with lots of options that other caching solutions – such as WP Super Cache – do not offer. This plugin adds CDN support to the WordPress blog. The support is disabled by default but can be activated and configured relatively easily.
• W3 Total Cache supports Amazon S3, Amazon Cloudfront, self hosted and other CDN distributions such as VPS.net, Akamai, MaxCDN and Rackspace. These solutions cost money, and the price can range from $0,10 to $0,25 per gigabyte of traffic served. The cost per gigabyte usually goes down if the website has lots of traffic. Amazon Cloudfront users, for instance, pay $0,15 per gigabyte for the first 10 TB but only $0,03 per gigabyte for every gigabyte over 1000 TB.

We have selected Amazon Cloudfront as our content delivery network. It may not be the cheapest available, especially for webmasters with low traffic websites, but it is easy to configure and maintain with the help of the W3 Total Cache plugin.

The first thing that system administrators need to do is to create an Amazon S3 account. It can take several hours before the account becomes activated. In the meantime, the system admin can install the WordPress plugin W3 Total Cache and verify that the blog is working as it should be. Although we only concentrate on the CDN configuration in this article and not the caching configuration, you may want to configure the caching as best as you can. Retrieve the access key and secret key from the Security Credentials page once it has been activated. Make sure the status is set to active there.

WordPress Configuration

Open the WordPress settings, switch to the W3 Total Cache configuration and change the CDN network to Amazon Cloudfront. Do not enable the CDN yet. Now switch to CDN settings and enter the access key and secret key in the settings. A bucket needs to be created in the next step, which is basically a folder on the Amazon Cloudfront network. As this did not work for us from within WordPress, instead we used the Firefox add-on Amazon S3 Firefox Organizer to create the bucket. If you had used a third party tool to create the bucket then enter it’s name in the bucket field now.

AWS Management Console

Now switch to the AWS Management Console and create a new distribution. Select the bucket that had been created earlier as the origin and enter a CNAME that you plan to us for the CDN. This is necessary if you want your users to see a URL such as cdn.yourdomain.com instead of dx7ffewrewr.cloudfront.com when connecting to your website. You can pick any CNAME you want at this stage. Keep all the other parameters in their original state.

The new distribution should appear in the listing. It is ready when the status reads enabled and the state deployed.

Web server or host

Switch to your web host or server now. We need to create the new CNAME for the CDN. We are going to show you how it is done if the domain is hosted at Godaddy.

Log into your Godaddy account and click on Domain Manager once the overview page has loaded. This is the page that is displayed after login. Click on the D icon next to the domain name that you want to configure the CDN for. This opens the dashboard for that domain. Select More Settings and click on the Manage button next to the Total DNS / MX entry. Select to Add a new CNAME and enter the same name that you selected during the distribution creation in the AWS Management Console. If you followed our example it would be cdn.

Enter the domain name shown in the distribution console in the Points To Host Name field. This will basically redirect requests to cdn.domainname.com to the Cloudfront url.

It takes some time before the redirection becomes active. You can use this tool to check if the CNAME is active.

Enter the cloudfront domain name and the CNAME in the CDN configuration in the WordPress blog. Save the settings before continuing.

Recap

So far we have performed the following steps:

• Created an Amazon S3 account
• Installed the W3 Total Cache plugin
• Copied the access and secret key and entered it into the CDN configuration screen of the W3 Total Cache plugin
• Created a bucket
• Created an Amazon Cloudfront distribution
• Configured a new CNAME pointing to the domain name of the new distribution

Once this has been done it is time to test the configuration by clicking on the Test S3 Upload button. If this returns that everything is running fine then you are ready for the final step. If not, then you need to retrace the steps done so far to find the problem.

Transferring files to the CDN

If the upload test was successful then you are ready to transfer data to the CDN. Now transfer your media library, include files, theme files, minify files and custom files to the CDN. This is done in the WordPress admin interface. Depending on the amount of data that needs to be transferred, this can take some time.

Activate the CDN

Switch to the General Settings tab once all the data has been transferred to the CDN. Place a checkmark in the Enable CDN box to activate the content delivery network. You should now test the blog to see if everything is up and running as it should be. This includes accessing various blog pages, leaving comments and using proxies to connect from other locations around the world.

Conclusion

It takes between one and six hours to configure and activate a CDN on the WordPress blog. Most of the time is spent waiting for the DNS to propagate, the account to become active and the data to be transferred. Webmasters should check the speed of their website in Google Webmaster Tools (or other tool) to see if the changes have decreased the load time for the users of the site. They should also monitor the costs over at Amazon.

Bleachbit easily clears out free space, removes junk, and helps to guard your privacy. Bleachbit goes beyond just deleting files. You can set this tool up to shred your files as well…so when they are gone, they are really GONE! It’s not just for Linux though. Bleachbit is available for Windows as well – and both versions are open source. In this article I will show you how to install and use Bleachbit.

Installation

Installing Bleachbit is simple. Go to the download page and download the version that is right for your distribution.  There are binary files available for Ubuntu, Fedora, CentOS, Mandriva, Debian, OpenSuSE, RHEL, and SLED. Let’s take a look at installing in either a Ubuntu or Debian environment. The file you will download will be a .deb package. Save that file to familiar directory and follow these steps:

1. Open up a terminal window.
2. Change to the directory where the Bleachbit binary is stored.
3. Issue the command sudo dpkg -i bleachbit-XXX.deb Where XXX is the release number.

That’s it. Bleachbit is now installed.

Usage

Figure 1

When you first fire up Bleachbit the Preferences window will open up along with the main window (see Figure 1). As you can see there are three tabs to configure:

General: If you are really concerned about privacy you can check the box for Overwrite files to hide contents. What this will do is overwrite deleted files so their contents can not be viewed.

Drives: Add a drive (directory) to be included in the overwriting of free space.

Languages: All languages will be deleted except for those checked.

Figure 2

Now let’s take a look at the main window. Bleachbit is really quite simple to use. Scroll down to the section you want to set up (see Figure 2), make your selections, and click either Preview (to see what will be done) or Delete (to run the actions).

You may notice, depending upon the sections you mark, that you will get either information or warnings. For example, in the System section if you click Memory you will be warned that this section is experimental and it could cause system problems. If you’re working on a production machine you might want to avoid selection this option. Another warning you might see is the Free Disk Space will alert you that the option is slow. So if you’re going to opt to clean the free disk space (this is overwriting deleted files) your system might become a bit sluggish or the cleaning might take more time than expected.

Once you have made your selections click Preview which will then give you a report detailing all of the files it will delete. If you’re happy with the report, click Delete and Bleachbit will do it’s business.

Final thoughts

If used with caution, Bleachbit will keep your system free of junk and your deleted files free from prying eyes. Just make sure you do use this with caution – especially on production machines, where data loss is tantamount to you losing your sanity or your job.

Warrick is a Perl script that tries to restore websites from various Internet sources including Archive.org and the three popular search engines Google, Yahoo and Bing. Installation is a bit more complex than running an executable but still doable even for inexperienced users. The computer program is provided as a version for the Windows and Linux / Unix operating system. Windows users need to install a Perl interpreter such as Active Perl before they can run the script from the command line.

The developers have created a step by step guide for Windows users on how to install and use the script on the operating system. The Warrick website contains examples on how to use the script to restore single pages and entire web projects.

The command “warrick.pl -r -wr ia -c http://yourwebsite.com/” will reconstruct all pages of the website that are stored in at least one of the online sources used in the recovery process.

The real value of this application is that it is highly customizable. You can basically point it to any folder on your hard drive which you want observed. This can be the Internet Cache of Internet Explorer, Firefox or Opera but also other folders, say those of P2P applications.

The heart of Cache Sort is the configuration file which can be accessed by right-clicking the Cache Sort icon in the Windows system tray. You can change the folder that is observed in here, the file extensions, if they should be moved or copied, the scan interval, the minimum file size of the files, files that should be ignored and where to put the files.

Even if the contents of a website get deleted they are still accessible through caches which means that we will most likely be able to get everything we need. Most major Search Engines use caches and store information of their crawlers in there. The crawlers report the contents of a website to the Search Engine who stores it in its cache.

Google, Yahoo, Live and Ask all offer a cached version of websites in their search results. Clicking on a cached link will display the content that was last reported by the crawler to the search engine.

Ask: (Click on Cached)

Google: (Click on Cached)

Live: (Click on Cached Page)

Yahoo: (Click on Cached)

There is another method that I would like to point you at that could work. The Coral Content Distribution network uses its own cache to display websites that are busy, unresponsive or down. To access this you add .nyud.net to the hostname. For ghacks it would mean that you would open the url www.ghacks.net.nyud.net.

A far easier method would be to use the freeware Movie Extractor Scout lite. The Movie Extractor Scout scans the cache of Opera, Internet Explorer and Firefox automatically and create a list of all the flash files that it finds in there. You may watch them once the list has been created, grab the download link or add them to your favorites which means that the file is saved to another place on your hard drive.

You may wonder how you can get those flash files into your cache in the first place. This is really easy, just visit the website and view or play. The file will be automatically transferred to your cache. Some multi file games might not work with Movie Extractor Scout lite but most single ones do.

The developers website has a tutorial on how to create executable files from swf (the flash files) which is great if you want the application to be standalone. (sending to a friend for instance).