Zen-Blocker

Inspiration

Zen-Blocker draws inspiration from minimalist Zen philosophy and popular digital wellbeing apps. We created a browser-based solution to bring mindful technology usage to desktop browsing habits, blocking ads, custom content, and putting you into that zen.

What it does

Website Blocking: Prevents access to distracting websites during focus sessions Smart Content Filtering: Uses GloVe word embeddings to detect and blur distracting content based on context, not just keywords Focus Timer: Implements the Pomodoro technique for structured work sessions Category Controls: Organizes distractions by type (social media, news, shopping, etc.)

How we built it

We developed Zen-Blocker as a Chrome extension using JavaScript, HTML, and CSS. The core semantic content filtering system powered by GloVe (Global Vectors for Word Representation) embeddings. This system converts text into mathematical vectors and calculates similarity scores between content and keywords, enabling it to understand context and detect thematically related content—not just exact matches.

Challenges we ran into

It was challenging to parse html structure to find relevant context.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Implementing semantic content analysis in a lightweight browser extension Creating an intuitive UI that makes digital mindfulness accessible

What we learned

We have learned how to build chrome extensions.

What's next for Zen-Blocker

We plan to add an ai-generated content blocker to detect and block ai-generated content at the users whim, and make the detection and identification of concepts stronger.