Blokd

A Chrome extension that tracks users' time on certain websites and alerts them with memes when their time is up.

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Inspiration

A little over a year ago, life as we knew it came to a drastic halt as the COVID-19 pandemic began to spread. All daily activities, most notably university classes and work, shifted from being in-person to being totally online. With this shift came the need to adapt to staring at screens all day, which limits one’s attention span and can quickly become tiresome. That is why we came up with Blokd, a Chrome extension that keeps you on track when you stray from the work you’re supposed to be doing.

What it does

Blokd keeps track of the time you spend on distracting websites such as YouTube and Netflix and pops up a meme reminding you to stay on track when your time limit for these websites is reached.

How we built it

We built our extension from scratch by looking at tutorials online and built our accompanying informational website by building upon a bootstrap.

Challenges we ran into

Our biggest challenge was that none of us had learned javascript and HTML before, so we had to learn those languages before we could continue developing the extension. To overcome it, we spent a lot of time going over the basics of each of the languages and looked at sample code to better understand what and how we would want to implement each desired feature.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Throughout the course of this project, we improved upon our Javascript, HTML, and CSS abilities, since we are all beginners at those languages, and figured out how to collaborate effectively via GitHub.

What we learned

We learned how to collaborate over GitHub and created a project from scratch in 24 hours. We also learned how to debug errors that were unfamiliar to us and how to host a website using Google Cloud.

What's next for Blokd

Something we would have loved to add to Blokd is the ability to track the individual times spent on each website. This way, we could order the websites by which category seems to be most distracting for the user and add in other features to minimize the distraction these websites cause.

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