My Chrome Extension DistractionBlocker | Hacker News Reader

My Chrome Extension DistractionBlocker

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12 pointscsouth14 comments

Seriously, no URL shorteners on HN -- even Google's.

My apologies. I wasn't aware that this was frowned upon. I will keep it in mind for the future.

On the other hand, the stats are kind of interesting.

That was my main reason for doing it. I was wanted to see what kind of interest it generated without having to wait for analytics to update.

Nice effort! Though, it seems like this extension's functionality greatly overlaps that of StayFocusd's (1). Is there any "killer" feature to get me (and other StayFocusd users) to switch over?

(1) https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/laankejkbhbdhmip...

To be honest I wasn't aware that this existed. It seems that a lot of the stuff they are down is all the stuff I had planned so its going to be back to the drawing board to come up with ideas that will make this plugin a contender to this one. Currently DistractionBlocker is very much a work in progress and hopefully it will continue to grow with feedback from the people that use it.

I was a co-founder of 8aweek.com (YCW08) which was a similar concept for firefox.

See screen shots: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/6562/

The trouble about doing it for one browser is that your other browsers quickly come into use.

One system wide fix is to edit your hosts file: http://thingsilearned.com/2007/05/04/combating-internet-addi...

but it only blocks you from sites instead of giving you nice time limits. And it becomes too easy to change back.

I wish there was something that offered the limit functionality but for all browsers/access but currently i know of nothing.

RescueTime (YC W08)'s Get Focused app is the best implementation of this I've seen.

You sparked off an interesting conversation with myself and a developer friend about just how to do this and I think we have the answer... Stay tuned.

You've just inspired me to mention my Safari Extension MindfulBrowsing - that does a similar thing. It's been up for a few weeks now, but I hadn't posted it here. Perhaps thanks to you, I don't need to do a chrome port now!

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1745790

Any thoughts on this / ideas for expansion would be awesome

Suggestions:

1) The icon needs some work. Not sure what you're trying to represent.

2) When you click enable/disable in the popup menu, the menu should automatically disappear. You shouldn't have to click again to dismiss it.

3) If while you have the extension disabled you load a page in your blocked list, then enable the extension, then refresh the page, the page doesn't get blocked.

Awesome feedback. I know the over all design (including the icon) needs a lot of work, and an upcoming update should include that. In this update I will work on the automatic disappear.

The refresh thing has to do with the way chrome handles this event. I'm working on a work around for it right now.

An "Allow for X minutes" feature would be awesome. That way I'd never have to disable it, I could just give myself small breaks every so often.

This is in the works right now.

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