Magento: Fastest way to hide empty categories in Magento frontend?

What I'm trying to do seems trivial bu开发者_C百科t I've been looking on Google for this for the past 3 hours and can't find it...

--> I'm just trying to list the categories of my website but hide those that are empty AND that all their subcategories are also empty (no products).

Shouldn't that be easy to do?? Everything I've found seems utterly complicated or custom-coded. Am I the only one that doesn't want to show empty categories?

Note: I'm using Magento 1.3.2.4, I don't want to manually hide categories in backend.

There is an article about that from Pratski :

Display Only If There Are Products In The Category