Creating a simple extension to block websites
It’s just outrageous that sometimes I’d put myself in a zombie mode and just keep following news (even if something like HackerNews which, in theory, should be a good source of interesting information) for so long and not really produce much. I decided to try blocking all these sources for a while and see how it goes.
There are several of them out there, as you might expect, but why not give a try implementing it? I’d learn something new (and procrastinate with a “reason”).
From the several Javascript APIs for extensions that are out there, there’s one that is very suitable for our needs: webRequest (yeah, I’m linking to MDN - nowadays the Firefox extension ecosystem uses the same standardized APIs as Chrome does).
onBeforeRequest (optionally synchronous) fires when a request is about to occur. This event is sent before any TCP connection is made and can be used to cancel or redirect requests. (https://developer.chrome.com/extensions/webRequest)
