Media Mirror

(Media Mirror is written as a final project for HarvardX's CS50x Introduction to Computer Science course at edX.org. It is the author's first independently-conceived program written from scratch. It was written both as a a simple, clean, and hopefully interesting tool, as well as an exercise for the author to improve his programming skills. The author hopes that it has achieved both goals.)

This extension records how many articles you have read on eight of the most popular American news sites, according to Alexa (New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, ABC News, CNN, Huffington Post, Fox News, and NBC News), and displays the information to you as a graph - your "Media Mirror."

The extension does not imply any set-in-stone goals. It is written as a simple exercise of self-quantification, and the author certainly does not believe, for example, that having a perfectly even pie chart like the one in the icon is "best," nor that the more colourful your chart is the better, nor anything of that sort. The user is free to do with the data what they will. If pigs are likely to fly before you ever read a Fox News article or a Huffington Post op-ed, you will not be breaking any rules. Nonetheless, the extension will work best given a few conditions: - You read the news. Like, actually read it. The app can't tell if you've read the article open in your tab or if you've just clinked the link with no intention of reading it; it records the article just the same. - You read a fair amount of news (which the author hopes to promote). If you read an article a week, the extension will still remember that you have and you will still likely be able to glean some meaning from the data, but for reasons of statistics your data will be less meaningful than that of someone who reads five or six articles a day. - You read news from these sites. The arbitrary criteria the author used to determine which sites would be recorded are that the site should be: in English, "of national interest" (so no local papers), primarily reporting (so no Slate or the Atlantic, which are primarily opinion pieces), American (although the author hopes to release other editions in the future - he is, after all, Canadian), and in the Alexa top 500 most visited websites on whatever day he got to that part of the code. If you only read news from other websites, the extension will just tell you to "read some news!", which of course you're doing anyway, but it doesn't know that. If you only mostly read news from other places, though, it will still be informative.

Also, keep in mind that in this age of social media, your reading habits are almost certainly not purely your own! Your Media Mirror is likely to be built on a combination of your own habits and the habits of your friends and others around you. This is good. You may not realize how varied or how static your reading habits are if, for example, you think less about the sites your Facebook newsfeed points you to and more about the sites you go to on a daily basis.