Ask HN: How can I analyze my own browsing behavior with only local tools? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: How can I analyze my own browsing behavior with only local tools?

11 pointsrambojazz7 comments

How can I analyze and make statistics of my own web browsing behavior using only local software, and without giving out my personal browsing history to any 3rd party?

View on HN

On OSX, I wrote an installable startup daemon that logs the current window, and for browsers, captures the URL from the address bar, and logs it to a file. The sampling can be whatever period you decide, but you have to write your own analytics. I haven't made it generally available, but it was a pretty quick project to capture the basic data.

Here's the basic outline:

* Bash script that uses lsappinfo front to figure out what has focus * log the time, the app name, and other useful data

* If the current app is a browser, then branch on the browser type and "return URL of" the front tab or current document depending on the browser

* Echo whatever you want to capture to STDOUT

Then write up a startup .plist file to install and log the output.

https://timingapp.com seems to fit the bill, it’s a local app for os x with optional sync capabilities

I used the free trial when it first came out, it's pretty slick.

I use https://github.com/Naereen/uLogMe (it's a fork of a tool Andrej Karpathy wrote a few years ago: http://karpathy.github.io/2014/08/03/quantifying-productivit...). It collects data on your general computer usage by measuring the active time and amount of keystrokes per window. It has two parts: some scripts to collect the data and a web interface to visualize the data.

The main drawback of such tools is that most ot them seem to require X11 and won't work with wayland.

If you use Firefox, there's a local file called places.sqlite that stores history, queries, bookmarks, etc.: http://kb.mozillazine.org/Places.sqlite

ManicTime and Leechblock are two solutions that work entirely locally, on Windows.

Edit: I meant with free/opensource software and possibly on linux.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com