// the find
alyssaxuu/carden
Flashcards with spaced repetition and gamification 🌱
Carden is a Chrome extension for turning pages you are reading into spaced-repetition flashcards. It schedules reviews with the SM2 algorithm and adds deck organisation, stats charts and points for practice. It suits people who read a lot on the web and want to retain some of it, though the hosted version is a paid subscription.
- The scheduler is SM2, a published algorithm, and the README names it, so review intervals can be checked against the spec rather than trusted on faith.
- Card creation happens on the page you are reading (content.js and the context and overlay scripts in the tree), so you don't have to leave the browser to make a card. That removes the friction that stops most people from making cards at all.
- Import and export as .txt and .csv means your decks aren't locked into the extension, which matters for a tool you'll be relying on for years.
- The last push was June 2022, more than four years ago. Nothing in the repo shows the extension has been kept working against current Chrome, so expect to debug it before it runs.
- The backend is a set of hand-written PHP endpoints on MySQL. CORS is handled by editing the access-control header in every file, and self-hosting means replacing POST URLs across the extension's JavaScript by hand. The README's numbered setup list also repeats item 4, which says something about how much the self-hosting path has been exercised.
- Subscription gating goes through ExtensionPay, a third-party service. Anyone self-hosting has to decide what to do with that paywall code, and the README doesn't say.