Puggle.me helps people with limited internet connectivity find data-plan friendly websites. A great deal of the modern web is inaccessible to people with limited data plans. Puggle.me is a lightweight Bing-powered search that shows the size of each resultant link. Users with extremely limited plans can also receive search results via SMS.
puggle.me homepage
puggle.me results page
- Minimal webpage design (i.e., by not using Bootstrap)
- Opens websites and scans webpage on the server so that users don’t have to use their data to find out how big a website is
- Puggle.me only shows the results rendered from website scan processes from the server. This is to avoid making puggle.me’s file sizes larger than it has to be.
PhantomJS, SQL Alchemy, SQLite, Flask, Jinja, JavaScript, Python, HTML, CSS, Bing Search API, Twilio API
Current
- PhantomJS opens up website and adds up total file sizes
- Python wrapper function using subprocess (Popen and PIPE)
- Processes run in parallel scanning multiple websites at the same time (multi-thread)
- User can receive search results from SMS (Twilio API)
- Cache search results to database (SQLite)
- 9 second timeout for SMS input processes
- 20 second timeout for web input processes
Future
- Deploy app on Heroku
- Graph to show breakdown of each website’s components (e.g., images, CSS, JS, etc)
- “Random button” to render cached search results
- Average data size for websites
- Write program to load process results faster
- Show cost of loading each website, according to individual data plans
Opens website and scans website file sizes
Python wrapper function - wraps dataMeasure.js function in a Python function called in server.py
Sets up SQLite database for caching website results
Core Flask app - queries database for caching results and lists routes
Used Bing Search API for search engine
Used Twilio API for text messaging