nilshah98 / think-again

A chrome extension to, well pause and think again before entering that rabbit hole

Think-Again

A chrome extension to, well pause and think again before entering that rabbit hole

Why ?

Many a times I have found myself mindlessly roaming on the internet, seeping deeper and deeper into some rabbithole, losing track of time. And when finally the day ends, look back and regret, how time flew by and I couldn't do anything.
Upon some realisation and research I realised that, if given a pause and time to think about something, people tend to make more calculated response, rather than go with their gut feeling, and hence this idea was born.

What ?

This chrome extensions, maintains a list of blocked domains and pauses user everytime, they try to access it either by navigating to it, or switching to it. Along with also provides some much needed information

1. A personalized motivation quote
2. Domain accessed
3. Number of times this domain has been accessed
4. Amount of time spent on this domain
5. Percentage of day left
6. And finally buttons (pills) to choose from

How to install ?

1. Open the "Extensions" page chrome://extensions/ in the browser and turn on the Developer mode.
2. Click on the Load unpacked button and select the directory where the build extension is placed.

Components

• This can be seen in the screenshot below message -

• This gets active when a new tab is opened and navigates to a blocked domain, or when switching to a tab already having blocked domain
• Finally 2 buttons are provided, one to move forward to the blocked domain, and the other to go some productive website, mentioned by the user.
• These things, which are mentioned by the user, the blocked domains, redirect url, quotes can all be provided through the popup which opens on clicking the Think Again icon in the menu bar

• Once an item is inserted in the popup can remove those and view those in the options page, which can be accessed by the button in the popup.

• As can be seen options page contains list of blocked domains, quotes and redirect url, and all can be added using popup

Features

• Add domains to block
• Add motivational quotes to display for blocked domains
• Add redirect url to get out of these blocked domains
• Reset the data for each blocked domain, at midnight
• Sync this data across google chrome devices
• Block on navigating or switching

Screen Recordings

Blocked Domains

Redirect Link

Motivational Quotes

To Do

• Timer for blocked websites
• Activate icon on blocked websites

Contact & Additional Info

• For any bugs or suggestion can mail at [email protected]
• If interested added writeups can be found here

think-again's Issues

Get the current domain name

Currently using - ^(?:https?:\/\/)?(?:[^@\n]+@)?(?:www\.)?([^:\/\n?]+) query to segment the URL into groups and extract domains from it.

Works well for websites containing any amounts of subdomain, and only one top level domain, ie. .com, .net, etc. Gives false results for something like - home.example.co.in. Current function returns co while the domain is example.

The function getDomain can be found in background/backgroundTabs.js which is doing the domain extraction.

Some, tests which should be passed -
home.example.co.in -> example
home.example.com -> example
home.room.example.co.in -> example
home.room.example.com -> example

Maintain persistence when background script unloading

There are various reasons for the background script to go inactive, (unload) and when that happens, all the data that is not persistent is lost, which includes lastDomain active, and lastTime active, which are important for our calculations.

Use, chrome runtime onSuspend to fire the event when background script unloads, and persist data in chrome storage then.

Additional resources -
chrome app lifecycle