Friday, June 5, 2009

Status Report

It's been a couple days since I've last posted, but I'm happy to say that I've finally made some real progress on my extension.

My extension now properly builds the graph of a browsing session, with favicons as the graph nodes for each page. However, they don't always work. Sometimes a websites favicon URL differs greatly from the URL visited. In these cases the node image defaults to a black box with a question mark. What annoys me most is that many sites don't have favicons, but I guess there isn't much I can do about that.


(Unfortunately the picture doesn't show very well.) I've also implemented a few features to the graph. Double clicking an node opens a new tab in the browser and loads that node's URL. Hovering the mouse over a node of the graph makes a nice little tooltip open, displaying the URL default, but it's main purpose is to hold an annotation.

A single click on a node opens up a little dialog box to edit the annotation.

What I'd eventually like to do is alter the JSViz source code so that the edges between nodes are actual objects, then I could place the annotation as a mouse over event for the edges since that's really where it belongs.

Overall I'm very pleased with how it's all going! Now that I have the basics done I can start cleaning up my code, adding features, and altering the interface.

My plan for Monday is to work on a better regular expression to extract favicon URLs. Currently I just parse each URL until I reach .com or .ca or .org, then search the moz_favicon table for any URL that has a matching initial section, up until the domain name. It's not the most effective query string. The first real feature I want to add is a saving/loading options, which I'll go into detail about on my next post, (hopefully) on Monday. Also on Monday I hope to make a short post about the meeting I have with Steve on Wednesday morning, concerning use cases and potential features.

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