Focomend

When the pandemic moved school, volunteering, and work online, my screen time, and my distractions, went up with it. One educational video would surface a recommendation, I'd click it, then another, and an hour was gone. I tried Forest's extension to block unproductive sites, but I needed YouTube for coursework, so I was constantly toggling it on and off. So I built my own extension instead, despite not knowing how.

The original plan was to blur unproductive videos, but that made YouTube painfully laggy to browse. Removing the videos entirely was both faster and better: even a blurred thumbnail can spark enough curiosity to make someone disable the extension. As my first Chrome extension, storing user preferences in local storage tripped me up too, but I worked through it.

I learned to build a Chrome extension with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript by reading the official docs and other articles online.

Maybe a launch on the Chrome Web Store, with a polish pass on the UX and the UI.