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Anyone know of any personal browsing monitor software? I'd like to be able to monitor my own browsing habbits and the time I spend on entertainment, vs work vs educational sites.

Something that offers more than simply looking at the history feature built into browsers. It would be nice if it gave you a breakdown of how much time you spend on certain categories of sites like social media, vs video, vs. news, productivity, etc.

I think it would be useful to know how one spends their time.

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I have to warn you, this question does not belong in stackoverflow and your question will be voted out. But anyways here is a list for firefox. mashable.com/2008/02/23/firefox-monitor-time-online – doc_180 Apr 8 '11 at 4:02
@jmadden - I'm going to have to agree with doc_180 on this one, and summon a close. I think it might find a better home on, say, superuser or webapps, though. – Kevin Vermeer Apr 8 '11 at 4:46
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migrated from stackoverflow.com Apr 8 '11 at 9:51

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4 Answers

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I use www.rescuetime.com and love it; it records the name of the currently-active window at any given time, so it can give you information on your browsing habits. Using this information, you can choose how productive certain tasks are (it will even give its best guess, making it pretty hands off, especially after you use it for a little while).

I love it and would highly recommend!

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This one has a couple pricing options: rescuetime.com/plans – Kevin Vermeer Apr 8 '11 at 4:06
i guess i should disclaim that i have the pro edition; it looks like the main thing i benefit from vs. the lite edition is the ability to log "offline" time. – Ryan Apr 8 '11 at 4:11
@Ryan - Yup, I've tried the lite edition (as a poor college student, I can't afford Pro), and it hasn't worked well for my purposes. – Kevin Vermeer Apr 8 '11 at 4:36
@reemrevnivek i'm sorry to hear that! i love the efficiency reporting that it does... keeps me honest :] – Ryan Apr 8 '11 at 4:39
@Ryan - Found another solution, though. Posted as an answer. – Kevin Vermeer Apr 8 '11 at 4:44
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up vote 0 down vote

www.timesnapper.com is a general time snapshot tool, not sure how in depth that it goes on the browsing though.

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I've recently discovered the hosts file. It makes a very effective (if low-tech and zero-tolerance) browsing monitor.

127.0.0.1    chat.stackoverflow.com
127.0.0.1    news.ycombinator.com
# ....etc.

A file like this directs requests for those sites to localhost. If you just needed to check an API, and were tempted to drop by a time-wasting site, there's just enough of a gap when you realize "Oh, wait, I redirected that to localhost, I'd have to go edit the hosts file to visit..." that I just get back to work.

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thats not a monitor, thats a way to BLOCK things. a monitor WATCHES things. – akira Apr 8 '11 at 10:25
@akira - True, but a blocker fulfills my purpose for a monitor. – Kevin Vermeer Apr 8 '11 at 14:33
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up vote 0 down vote

for chrome there is ChromeNanny:

it allows you to create tags and whitelist certain urls and assign the tags to it. how much time you spend on such white listed urls is gathered and presented like this:

enter image description here

you can obviously also block other urls at a given time.

if you want to track all apps and not only what you surfed: i once was pretty happy with ManicTime, its similar to rescuetime.

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