Visual History for Konqueror

Synopsis

A Konqueror plugin that adds graph features to visual the browsing history.

Goals

To develop a new plugin that works with Konqueror.

Project Details

Visual History is a Konqueror plugin that adds graphical features to visualize the browsing history. It is primarily designed to facilitate web surfing, increase web surfing efficiency and extract more information from history.

Basically, it displays a graphical history showing sites the user visits. The sites are connected with links so it is easy to see the "browsing history tree" the user follows. This is useful when one wants to revisit the page he visited but cannot recall it.

Some statistics like the visit time and number of link clicks are also displayed, which give the user a rough idea of his browsing history. This is very useful. It can be used to find out what is his favorite sites. It can also be useful for the user to find out why he wastes so much time wandering on the web:)

Potential enhancement to it includes: visual history control, visual history sharing, visual history information management.

Visual history control is designed for privacy and security reasons. Users can delete records or add password to protect themselves.

Visual history sharing can be used to share wonderful surfing experiences with friends or family members. It can also be used for psychologic and sociological researches.

Visual history information management is used to organize the visited sites. User can group sites by topics, times or domains, add comment to each site, export to disk or upload to sites. This feature enables user to maximize the usage of the history and can be used to further communication with others.

Project Schedule

June 15th - June 30th: Exam time. I intend to use this time familiarising myself with the Konqueror internals.

July 1st - July 31th: Create an outline design and implement the core component. A demonstration version will be finished by the end of July.

Aug. 1st - Aug. 31th: Implement the enhance component.

Motivation

I'm a graduate student in Tsinghua University. My research focus is network security. In may spare time, I love surfing on the web. There are many wonderful sites on the Internet. But sometimes when I want to see a site I visited, I could not recall it, not even a name:( Browsing the history is always a tedious task, since it may includes hundreds of sites. But the sites are virtually connected by links, actually it is those links that lead me to other links. Visualizing the sites and links will make it easy to find lost site. This is where the initial idea came from.

Sometimes I found myself spending too much time in front of a computer, mostly browsing the web. Visualization the browsing history help me understanding why and how I spend the time on the web.

Besides that, recently I'm working on network traffic visualization. Experience in this field makes me believe proper visualization can help people learn more from tables and lists. And this experience is extremely helpful for completing the project.