Law Students

three features I?d love in leechblock

By Luis Villa

I love leechblock. It really helps keep my life sane. I was working some with it this morning to tweak my settings, and it seemed like a good time to write about three features I’d kill for, even to the point of putting up money for them if there were a way to sponsor features (or sponsor third-party hacking- bounties, if you will):

1. ‘block all sites except this one for ____ minutes’- a button that blocks the browser from going to any other domain for ____ minutes. Sort of like Freedom but with an out for one specific website (and obviously only for your browser.) Goal would be to allow you to focus on one site for 45-50 minutes, so it should probably close or block access to other tabs as well.
2. ‘no, I really need this’- give an option (probably a popup of some sort?) that allows you to break through leechblock in the off case you really need something. For example, I like to block nytimes.com all the time, but (when I was editing a journal) I often needed to access a times article to confirm a claim in an article. This would obviously require some sort of time-consuming task in order to prevent you from ‘just’ clicking through all the time- probably something like a series of captchas, or just typing in a specific series of random characters that can’t be copied/pasted.
3. ‘this page has an RSS feed: subscribe to it and add it to leechblock? [yes/no/don't ask again for this domain]‘- one of the strategies that has helped save me over the past few years is aggressively subscribing to feeds, blocking the actual domains, and then only visiting them when I’m in feedreading mode. Making that semi-automatic, and easy to do, would be terrific.

It may well be time to port leechblock to jetpack and rethink the UI as well, but those are bigger projects that I can’t randomly beg (or bribe) people to do.

Full post as published by Luis Villa's Home Page on April 22, 2010 (boomark / email).