When I demoed my application during the Tuesday meeting the grad students seemed interested; I was glad for all the feedback and suggestions. I've already finished altering it to as Jon Pipitone and others suggested, to represent link-following as solid lines in the graph and other visits (typing in a URL, clicking Home, a Bookmark, etc) be dotted lines. I thought this was going to be hard but Johnathon's suggestion of using document.referrer allowed me to make this change in less than 20 minutes. One thing I really want to do that was suggested is make the size of the node correlate to the length of time spent on that website, this would be a great way to better display meaningful sites to the user. One of my immediate concerns would be if someone visited one site many times, say 6-7 times in one session, and each time was only a minute or so, the overall node size may be a false representation that does not agree with their view of the "importantness" of the site.
Having the sidebar of the trail of sites visited was not overly helped, since each site is only listed once it really just states the time of the fist visit. So I instead opted to list the edges, to give a complete overview of the order of links followed, which conveys more relevant information. But I'm finding it very difficult to keep a coherent graph while keeping the number of edges to a minimum and adding as little clutter to the screen as possible. For example, hitting the Back button does not log an edge, so if a user has a large graph, then hits the Back button a few times and then clicks a new link the resulting graph gives no indication that the user backtracked. The only way to tell is to scroll through the sidebar of links followed in order and watch the links of the graph highlight. It works, but visually the graph looks a bit odd when two links directly after one another in the sidebar list are on opposite sides of the graph.
My most recent accomplishment has been the move from a timer loop to an event listener for loads. It still loads multiple times, even after using the Mozilla suggestions to have the appropriate event only fire on documents loading. I just added a few if statements to prevent some boundary cases from getting through; it works but it looks sort of messy - "if (on && aEvent.originalTarget.nodeName == "#document" && !(curURL== pastURL) && !(curURL == 'about:blank'))" is what I currently have. The last part is for opening a new tab and then typing in a URL. One of the main reasons for wanting to switch to event listeners (aside from being the standard way of doing something like this) is that with a timer browsing with multiple tabs and tab switching caused an incoherent mess of a graph. Now looking back and forth between tabs does not cause an edge to be created in the graph. My next goal is to fix the issue of clicking a link and selecting "open in new tab". The problem is that the tab opens in the background (not in focus) and the load event doesn't seem to register with the listener I have added to the gBrowser object. My hope is that this is an issue Mozilla has dealt with and I just have to dig through their documentation to find the right event to listen for.
Although I have tabbed browsing sort of working I'm still behind on my schedule - I guess giving my self less than a week to release my extension for live testing for a bit short sighted. I think by next Wednesday I should be ready. I'll stop adding new features and instead focus on making it as understandable as possible.
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