. If you're interested in extending operating system or browser support, check out the [notes for contribution](https://codeberg.org/thor/browser-history-explorer/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md).](/static/be15ac78c51dad3cf5c219da0f49eb11/ac834/screenshot_758a6c44e9.webp)
. It is a film about what it means to be a woman cycling in different countries around the world.
The documentary was shot during an eleven-month bicycle touring trip from Brussels to Tokio, with Slowby's other co-founder [Dries](https://www.linkedin.com/in/driesvanransbeeck) (for more about their trip, see [_Road to the Rising Sun_](https://roadtotherisingsun.be/)).](/static/d61dc36d986fee9dd4bbe6dd36a454ee/08e43/Women_Don_t_Cycle_ced894520a.webp)
 for my personal projects at the time, and the [Harvest API](https://help.getharvest.com/api-v2/) for my Columbia Road work projects at the time.
- Time goals, which I set in the dashboard, for projects I wanted to commit to at the time. For example, "I want to learn Swedish for 6 hours per week" would be a goal.
The widget then showed my progress towards the goal of each project in a progress bar, dividing the time goal equally over each weekday. With colors, it visually represented how much I was on- or off-balance:
- <span style="color: blue;">Blue</span> meant: completed according to schedule
- <span style="color: red;">Red</span> meant: overdue, should have been done.
- <span style="color: gold;">Yellow</span> meant: to be done today.
- <span style="color: green;">Green</span> meant I "overshot" the goal, or did more than planned given this distribution (can be a bad thing!).
I used this for about two months, and I felt it did help me to achieve a better balance. A new tab page is one you see often, so I would get reminded of my undershooting and overshooting all the time, which would steer my behavior.
I wanted to take this step further, according to my original designs: what if you didn't just set a fixed number of hours as a project goal for a week/month, but would also integrate it with your digital calendar?
Then the tool would help you in more ways:
- When planning, you could add, re-scale and reshuffle calendar events for each project, until each project reached the desired quota of time: _"Is your calendar sound? Does it match your intentions?"_
- Your expectations for a day would be more fine-tuned: the dashboard wouldn't nudge you to work on a project on Tuesday or Wednesday if you wanted to complete it all Thursday.
- When your calendar changed, as it often does, you would see the impact it had on your overall distribution of time for a week/month, and you'd be better informed to make resulting changes.
But while getting somewhere, I had not finished this part of the implementation. Along the way though, I saw more opportunities for this Dashboard that I did try out.
## The "Streaks" Widget
Not everything ought to take a distinguishable number of hours in a weekly plan. A habit can be a small thing, like practicing on Duolingo for a few minutes each day. For these types of commitments, I added a "streaks" widget.
I picked two external services that I wanted to use daily at the time. Both had a "streaks" concept of their own.
- First, there was Vocabulary.com, the object of my [Vocabulary.com Enhancer tools](/projects/vocabulary-com-tools/). The entry would also link to my last-practiced list, so I could directly jump into the next session.
- Next, there was Readup.com (for which I didn't work yet at the time). Similarly, it showed my last Starred article.
Neither of these had a public API, however. This sparked some creative web engineering to retrieve arbitrary authenticated web app HTML from these sources. I used a web extension to proxy privileged requests with my cookies/credentials to my "new tab" page, which inconveniently was a regular web page. It needed to be a regular web page, because I relied on the Service Worker's Cache API to cache requests for quick loads, and that was not supported in extension pages at the time.
## The book widget
The last widget I added was the book widget. I didn't only want to track time spent on my computer, but also time spent learning otherwise: through books, or audio books, and bring it fairly into consideration along with the rest.
Using the same proxy extension, I could parse my progress on audio books with Audible's web app (see [this post](/articles/regex-puzzle-either-and/) on a regex challenge therein). I could then set a time goal to finish my book by a certain date. I also worked on fetching progress from Kindle's web app, but if I remember correctly, couldn't sufficiently reverse-engineer the web app to extract my progress.
## Conclusion & legacy
I used a development build of this project for some months as my daily-driver new tab, and enjoyed it! It helped me. However, after some time, I got stability problems with some widgets. Building unofficial APIs for personal data through web scraping does not guarantee stability, as HTML structures might change at any point. Other work encroached; I submitted my thesis, became a full-time employee at [Columbia Road](/work/#Columbia-Road), and _Dash_ faded out of focus.
I've re-pondered this concept sporadically ever since, so I might revisit it at some point.
### Potential
About a year after shelving this project, I learned about [Potential](https://potential.app), a humane tech start-up building a habit _forming_ app aligned well with what I had dreamed of for Dash. I tried out the app, and quickly started enjoying it. Potential also had a (much better designed) widget with automatically-updating streak counts, such as for Duolingo. I contacted their CEO, to present _Dash_ as a reference for a possible expansion of Potential into the web browser. Some discussion ensued.
Not much later, Potential opened a role for a Software Engineer. I got the job! (at least, for a few fun months, until it got cancelled by [some complicated times](https://welf.substack.com/p/its-over-were-so-back-potential-2024))](/static/ecbfe0e503c3303117a97240b61549ad/327b0/dash_demo_0b87f276f2.webp)
Now
Update fromWe moved countries! 🚚: a lot has happened since I last logged something here. At the end of November, we moved from Finland to Belgium. It became a tumultuous multi-day undertaking despite long preparations, but luckily we could count on the support of a handful of great friends, who I want to warmly thank once again! 🙏 Helsinki waved us goodbye with some snowfall, and it’s been good to be back in Belgium. In mid-February we will settle into our new long-term Brussels apartment.
Web reading, via Readup
