Inspiration
The content we consume through the internet has the ability to deeply impact our everyday life and mental health. We set out to “unduck your muck”, clean up or filter the content we see online based on personal preferences.
What it does
UNDUCK is a user orientated google chrome extension that will give you the ability to specify words you wish to change and create your own replacements for them . Giving you the ability to personalise your browsing experience. The extension has several features like personas which are a rule template that changes several words associated with a specific topic. Another key feature is the extension’s parental mode that automatically filters several profanities and the mode is locked in place with a pin.
How we built it
We created a chrome extension that interacts with the text on a webpage to find and replace the users blocked words with their chosen substitutes. Using VS Code, github, and google chrome we created an extension with three main access points: the foreground (interacts with the browser page), the popup (interacts with the popup) and the background (works behind the scenes). Using the chrome.storage API and communication lines between these three pages we were able to make the users choices persistent and dynamically update the page. We used CSS and JavaScript to animate the popup and create a more visually appealing experience.
Challenges we ran into
Over the course of this week we ran into numerous challenges. It was difficult to understand how chrome extensions were developed, especially in creating the setup structure of the extension. The most significant issue we faced was working out how to communicate between the three pages and the appropriate order of events to allow the functionality to be seamless.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
We are proud of the word replacement algorithm we developed, it replaces all instances of a blocked word on the browsing page without changing the URL. It is dynamic and allows you to block multiple words at the same time as well as decide whether or not you want the replaced words to appear bolded.
What we learned
There is a lot more behind Chrome Extensions then we imagined, but what you are able to achieve with them is broad and very exciting.
What's next for UnDuck
We plan to further develop and refine our UnDuck Chrome Extension by creating a Persona Marketplace, using APIs to summarise the topic of web pages and block them if they are about a users blocked topic, and then allow the user to whitelist certain URLs that the extension will not run on.
Log in or sign up for Devpost to join the conversation.