Bunny Browse 1.1

A new version of the BunnyBrowse Firefox extension is available here. Version 1.1 uses the Yahoo Image Search API to swap images in your browser with multiple bunnies. So if you get tired of that same old bunny, upgrade to BunnyBrowse version 1.1 and see multiple bunnies. If you get tired of bunnies in general, you can go into the options and change the search query to anything you want (I suggest "pitbull").

Send me your comments and let me know of any changes that you would like to see.

While this may not be very relevant to Identity Share, I posted here because I started this project while writing the Identity Share Extension for Firefox.

Documentation and Video

At long last I am nearing the end of the initial development of Identity Share. I have uploaded the final design document here. I have also created a 17 minute walk-through video which shows some of the functionality that is available on the site. You can find the walk-through at www.identityshare.net/about.php.

Thanks to everyone that has provided feedback and help during the development of the site.

"Follow a User" Up and Running

The "Follow a User" page at identityshare.net now has full functionality. To share one's browsing a person needs to download the Firefox extension at http://identityshare.net/extension.php. After installing and entering a user name and password, users can turn browser sharing on and off using a toolbar button (that turns red when sharing is off) or the tools menu in Firefox.

The "Follow a User" page lists all users who are currently sharing. Upon choosing a user, their browsing history, currently displaying 100 entries, will appear and update every 20 seconds. Clicking an entry shows the website in an html iframe. Users can leave comments on particular URLs. These comments currently aggregate in a users profile.

Thanks to all my friends who have installed the extension to assist in testing.

BunnyBrowse and Firefox Extensions

As I was working on my masters project, I ran into many problems trying to find ways to record a person's browsing to share on the site. I had originally wanted a "browser in a browser" solution using an Iframe, similar to browzmi.com. Initially, in the fall I had tested out creating a PHP proxy to parse websites and replace the URLs with my own, so that I could pass the Ifames's location back to the parent IdentityShare.net page. I quickly mocked it up and it mostly worked, with the exception of Javascript links being broken. I first realized what a shady task it is to record a users browsing history and pass it to my site when I had the google home page appearing at identityshare.net.

Luckily, when I was exploring Browzmi.com, one of the creators of the site, Travis Parsons, began to chat with me about my project. He explained that the PHP proxy solution is what they use in conjuction with a Firefox extension. He also told me of the unending hours of pain that they had put into creating the proxy and that a Firefox extension was the easiest solution. So I began, two days ago, knowing nothing about creating an extension, but also having written quite a bit of Javascript. Today, I have completed the first version of my extension and it is recording my whereabouts online as I type this post.

But the point of this post was also to share BunnyBrowse, a Firefox extension that I quickly made when I was testing Jquery inside of my extension code. It simply is a plug-in that will replace all images in your browser with bunnies by default. You can set the URL in settings to point to any picture that you want. While it has very little use, it still is fun and perhaps can even serve as a practical joke. Additionally, you can set the bunny's name in the settings and a mouseover of any image will show its name. The plug-in can be removed at any time by disabling or uninstalling it. Also, the plug-in is 100% safe and is not recording anything about your browsing habits.

Here is the link to the BunnyBrowse plug-in:
http://danielshaneupton.com/resources/bunnybrowse/bunnybrowse.xpi