Internet can be addictive and you may find yourself spending more and more time on online gaming, video or social networking sites. If you feel helpless before the fascinating time wasters of the internet, then you can use the Block Site extension in your Chrome web browser. This extension blocks or redirects the websites that you add to the blacklist. This way your procrastinating habit can be tackled, and you can concentrate more on your work or study.
The Block Site extension can be installed from the Google Chrome Web Store. After you have installed this extension in the Chrome web browser, you will not see anything like a toolbar icon etc. However the Block Site extension installs a right-click context menu item. To block a website, you can open that website, right-click anywhere on that web page and select Block site → Block this site as shown in the picture below:
This adds the currently open webpage (not the top level domain name) to the blacklist. If you visit that webpage again, it will be blocked and you would be shown a message to the effect. The message displays the webpage address it has blocked and the number of times it has been blocked so far. The number of attempts you made to access that webpage give you an idea of your addiction problem.
In the Block Site extension options, you can choose the blacklist or the whitelist mode. The blacklist mode allows you to block all the websites that you add to the black list. In the whitelist mode, only those websites which are present in the whitelist are allows to be visited – all other websites are blocked. You can also specify a redirect page for the blocked websites in both the modes. If you have a huge list of sites to be blocked or allowed in the CSV file format, then you can select that CSV file instead of adding the domain names one by one. There is also an option to password protect the settings so that only authorized people can make the changes or bypass the Block Site protection. Under the advanced category, there is a setting to block sites if a particular word appears in their URL.
The Block Site is a very useful extension for Chrome browser that can help you selectively block time wasting websites. Although there are more advanced ways to block sites like the HOSTS file method, but the Block Site extension provides with a simple and effective way to block or redirect desired sites in the Google Chrome browser.
You can download Block Site extension from https://chrome.google.com/webstore/.