http://www.ghacks.net A technology blog covering software, mobile phones, gadgets, security, the Internet and other relevant areas. Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:31:44 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.6 en hourly 1 http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/11/check-for-dead-rss-news-feeds/ http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/11/check-for-dead-rss-news-feeds/#comments Sat, 11 Oct 2008 18:59:35 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/?p=7136 Many tech savvy Internet users love RSS news feeds to keep up to date with the latest articles and news of their favorite websites. Unlike bookmarks however RSS news feeds cannot be checked for dead sites that do not get updated.

Rarst posted a process on his own website that makes it possible to check all feeds for dead links. The process can be broken down to exporting all feeds in an opml file, extracting the links into a new text file and checking the links with a link checker.

Some feed readers might provide an easier way of discovering dead blogs either because the owner abandoned it or deleted the website completely. Google Reader for one is offering a feature called Subscription trends which show inactive feeds. Users have to click on the Trends link in the top left menu and choose the inactive tab under Subscription trends to get there.

The user can display the top 10, top 20 or top 40 inactive blogs. The name of the blog and the data of the last update is shown in the menu afterwards. It is then easy to unsubscribe to blogs that have not been updated by clicking on the trashcan icon.

Tags: dead rss news feeds, dead-links, google reader, inactive feeds, inactive news feeds, rss news feeds, rss news reader, webmaster, websites

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]]> http://www.ghacks.net/2008/10/11/check-for-dead-rss-news-feeds/feed/ 2 http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/06/start-menu-cleaner/ http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/06/start-menu-cleaner/#comments Tue, 06 Mar 2007 09:33:26 +0000 Martin http://www.ghacks.net/2007/03/06/start-menu-cleaner/ The entries in the Windows start menu are growing all the time. Almost every program that you install adds an entry to the start menu and it happens that such entries are not removed when you uninstall a program. Sometimes only the folder with no content remains in the start menu, sometimes all of the links of an uninstalled program still reside there and point to a folder on your hard drive that is no longer there.

The freeware Start Menu Cleaner scans the complete start menu folder structure searching for empty folders and links that point to no where. If it finds such a folder or link it asks whether you want to delete the entry or leave it as it is. It scans the desktop as well which makes it an excellent tool for a quick scan of both areas.

You can choose to delete everything automatically without action from the user and choose to disregard shortcuts that point to files on network and removable drives. Start Menu Cleaner is only 90K in size and does not need to be installed, simply run it from any location you want.

Click on Cleaner in the left menu when you are on the authors homepage, there is unfortunately no direct link to the program.

Tags: dead-links, dead-shortcuts, filter-start-menu, remove-old-entries, scan-start-menu, start-menu, Windows

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