This week I discovered a fantastic Firefox plug-in called MeeTimer by Andy Mitchell, which actually helps me be more productive. Well.. I say this week, I have actually had it installed for a while, but have just found the motivation to configure and use it.

How it works is simple, it tracks the amount of time that you spend on individual websites, and allows you to group them by category. So, the company intranet may be classed as work, whereas hours whittled away on Facebook fall under the category of procrastination. All of this data is captured, and is available for your scrutiny. I’m also told that the next version will have lots of new features for slicing and dicing this data - including a quick slick Flex-based dashboard for visually exploring your data.

In addition to simple tracking, MeeTimer takes a pro-active role in making you productive, blacking out pages and adding pop-up’s to links - “Warning! You have already spent 4.4% of your working week poking your friend’s on Facebook, perhaps you should be working?”.

Its really quite cool, and its active deterrents really set it apart from other pieces of software which attempt to track the time spent in-front of the web browser.

For me I think that was the key to its usefulness, as it is far too easy to get carried away either on the likes of Facebook or even on geeky sites such as Ajaxian, which I often visit to keep up with the latest goings on in the JavaScript world. This is definitely a plug in which I will be keeping installed as I attempt to organize my life!

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Bumble Search Press Release

New Firefox Extension Provides Easy Methods to Discover Great Webpages

“Simple, powerful and practical”

Bumble Search cross pollinates the web.It discovers and injects relevant pages into your favourite websites.You can find information more easily, and easily find more information!

Automatically Discover New Worthwhile Webpages

Bumble Search will automatically interpret all the keywords in any page to capture its ‘essence’, and pump them into relevant search engines, to discover new and related information.For example, a news item on ‘Apple’ may contain the phrase ‘Intel Macbook’; Bumble Search can infer this, and utilise search engines like Google to discover other pages with these phrases.

Enhance Google, Amazon and Ebay

Specific web pages are merged with other highly relevant web pages, to create a single, exceptionally useful point of information.You have the power to put any search engine of your choice inside Google, for the times when you need to easily specialise a search.For example, if you are searching for a music review, you can try the band in Google, then instantly retry your search in Rolling Stone magazine.Alternatively, perhaps you are a fan of Mom’s Mince Pies, you can easily create a link within Google to search over this site at any time.You can cross reference an auction item in Amazon and Froogle, to ensure you never pay more than the commercial price for it.From Amazon you can look up your chosen product in Ebay to see if it is available cheaper 2nd hand.An extensible underlying system ensures that in the future, other developers will be able to add specialised cross pollination to a wider range of websites.

Additional Information

More information is available at the website: http://www.bumblesearch.com

Technical Highlights

The page keyword analyser engine is an original method that is both fast, and approximates the algorithm Google is believed to use; giving priority to correctly marked up semantics (e.g. bold phrases), hyperlinks, and paying special attention to human readable text.Such is the effectiveness of this method, it could be used as a basis of an SEO utility to evaluate your own webpages for better placement in the search engines.Scriptaculous - the Web 2.0 Javascript library - is utilised for the first time in a Firefox extension to create a highly appealing interface for Bumble Search.Web pages are analysed and modified in real time, by manipulating their inbuilt DOM model. Typically, this involves finding a ‘hook point’ in the web page (e.g. in Google, the point just before the first result), and injecting new HTML elements (e.g. the IFrame for alternate search engines).Hot keys (the ability to manipulate web sites like Google using the keyboard) and the Sidebar use the native Firefox development languages: XUL and Javascript. XUL, like HTML, allows the interface to be specified in a simple terminology, and then be attractively rendered on any platform that Firefox runs. However, unlike HTML it can interact better with the host computer, and interpret a wider range of human interactions (such as key presses).

An Ethical Note

As a result of Bumble Search’s power to manipulate websites, an ethical policy exists to protect the altered website’s integrity and business model.Bumble Search will not strip adverts from websites. The duality principle is also upheld: if we help one site (e.g. Amazon) we also help its competitor (in this case, Ebay).

Author

Bumble Search is an original product of Andy Mitchell, a freelance business/IT consultant in the UK. Other than an unhealthy attitude towards hard work, Andy is known to enjoy travelling, winter sports and other outdoor activities. The occasional beer has also, on occasion, passed his lips.Chris Korhonen, a web developer based in Brighton, UK, has been involved in both the testing and marketing aspects of Bumble Search. (more…)