Sporekeeper

Tend your tabs, time, and attention. A private, local focus and tab companion.

Sporekeeper notices when you have started working and asks whether you clocked in. That is the idea it started from, and the rest grew around it. You name a setup, you say what counts as working on it, and when you have been at it long enough a companion turns up and asks the question you meant to ask yourself. Everything it knows stays on your computer. CLOCK-IN REMINDERS: Name a setup, "Workday", "Thesis", "Contract work", anything you keep losing the thread of. Then tell Sporekeeper what counts as doing it: - Websites and tabs. Time on the sites you name counts. - People who email you. Outlook on the web only, and the comparison happens inside the tab. - Project folders in your editor (VSCode folders). This one needs a small helper program installed separately. When you have worked long enough, the reminder arrives. If you are in the browser it appears over the page you are on. If you are not, it comes as a system notification or as the card itself in its own window, whichever you chose. It carries the name of the setup and a link straight to wherever you actually clock in. Saving a setup is what turns it on. There is no second switch to hunt for. SPORE FOREST, FOR YOUR TABS: Sort your open tabs into folders you name, using rules you write. A folder is a name, a colour, some sites and some words, so "Job applications" can catch lever.co and greenhouse.io and anything with "application" in the title, across every site at once. It shows you the whole plan before it moves anything, with the rule that matched each tab, and moves nothing until you press the second button. It can suggest folders built from what you actually have open, never from a list of categories somebody guessed in advance. It can suggest folders from your browsing history, if you switch that on. It finds duplicate tabs and tabs you have not looked at in weeks, and gathers them for you. It can save a whole window of tabs to reopen later. If you approve a site individually, it can read that page's text to check its own work, so a company's careers page does not get filed as a job application. DAILY LIMITS: Give a site a number of minutes a day. Sporekeeper counts only while you are actually at the machine, so an hour at lunch does not spend your budget. It warns you before the time is gone, and a companion of your choosing delivers the news. If you turn on Tiger Parent mode, the site stops loading (your computer disconnects the website from your local Wifi) when the minutes are gone. To get back in you have to come to the settings page and switch it off, which is the whole of the difficulty and the whole of the point. FOLLOW-UPS, AND JOB HUNTING: Save a page you meant to finish. It keeps the title, the address, and how far along you are: saved, started, applied, or ignored. If one sits too long, someone comes to mention it. You can snooze any of them until a date you pick. If you are job hunting, this is where it earns its keep: - Scan the postings you have open. Sporekeeper reads the job title and the company off each one, and the pay range too if you have approved that site for reading. It shows you what it found and saves nothing until you agree. - It tells you when it is unsure. A company read out of the address is reliable; one guessed from a page title says so on the row. - Download the lot as a spreadsheet, with the columns you keep. Job title, company, pay, status, dates, link, and any column of your own that Sporekeeper leaves blank for you to fill in, like whether a recruiter has been in touch. Your headers, in your order. YOUR COMPANIONS: Plenty of creatures, all original pixel art generated from shape definitions in this project rather than taken from an asset pack. Pick who keeps you company and which painted scene they wait in. A different one can deliver each reminder. PRIVACY POLICY: Sporekeeper makes no network requests. Not few, none. There is no server, no account, no sign in, no analytics, no telemetry, no crash reporting, and nothing is ever sent anywhere. Everything it knows lives in your browser's own local storage. The full privacy policy ships inside the extension. You can read it without going anywhere, which seemed like the right way to deliver a policy that says it never makes a request. Nothing that reads more than it needs to is on by default. Reading the text of a page is off, and when you turn it on you approve one site at a time. Reading your history is off. Each is its own switch with its own explanation of exactly what it would read. Nothing is noticed for you. A saved page exists because you pressed a button. A tab moves because you approved the plan. The folders are rules you wrote. There is a delete button for every kind of thing it keeps, and one that clears the lot. One switch pauses all monitoring at once, and leaves everything you saved by hand alone. WHAT IT DOES NOT DO: It does not read your email, only the sender names you typed, and only inside an Outlook tab. It does not watch pages you have not named. It does not upload anything, because it cannot: there is no code in it that makes a network request. It does not have an account to sign into, and it never will if the answer stays local. Most importantly, it is free, with no ads or upsell. Hope you enjoy it! It's been pretty useful for my personal work.