Brinsley

Turn an article your class is already reading into a vocabulary deck, in about ten seconds.

Choosing the words by hand, scrolling back to find the sentence each one appeared in, and typing both into a spreadsheet is an evening's work. Brinsley does it while you wait.

1. Highlight the Passage. Any text or passage in an article you are already on.
2. Click the Icon. Brinsley picks out the words worth teaching and pairs each one with the sentence it appeared in — word for word from your article, not a dictionary example.
3. Untick Anything You Don't Want. For any word you may want to exclude.

What You Get

• The words worth teaching, chosen by how common a word is rather than how long it is.
• Each word's own sentence, taken word for word from the text your class read.
• A level estimate on every card, written ~B1, ~B2 and so on.
• A review table, so you decide what makes the deck.
• A .csv built for Anki, tagged with the article it came from.

Why the Sentence Matters

A definition tells a student what a word means.
The sentence tells them how it is used; in the piece they just read, in the register the writer chose.
That is the laborious part to collect by hand, and it is the part Brinsley exists to do.

Six Promises, and What Holds Each

Brinsley is built so that trusting us is unnecessary.
Every promise is worded once, in the open, and held by something that fails if it stops being true.

• Brinsley makes no network request. There is no server to speak to, no account to hold, and no key to surrender. Held by the extension's own content security policy, which permits no destination at all; and proved at runtime by pointing a loaded copy at a live server and watching the browser refuse the call while that server's log stays empty.
• Two Permissions Only: activeTab and Scripting. No host permissions are sought, and no storage permission is held. Read back off a loaded copy, not merely off the manifest: the running browser is asked what it actually granted. Brinsley ships unminified, so the manifest inside the package can be opened and the same two read off it by hand.
• Nothing runs until you ask. Brinsley declares no content script and lies dormant until you click it. A build that declared one would not get past the check.
• What you highlight is never stored. Brinsley holds no storage permission, so there is nothing to store it with. It is held while the panel is open, and written only to the file you save. The browser does not hand the storage interface to an extension that has not asked for it, so on a loaded copy that interface is not empty — it is absent. This is a stronger thing to be able to say than "we did not write anything down", and it is why the permission was given up.
• Every byte of Brinsley ships inside it. No third-party code, no analytics, no telemetry. Nothing is loaded from anywhere. There is no library, no tag, no font request, and no content delivery network in the package.
• The sentence on the back of every card is taken word for word from the article you highlighted. Brinsley writes no example sentences of its own. Every sentence in the finished deck must occur, character for character, in the text you highlighted, and every word on a card face must occur inside its own sentence. This is the reason the product exists, so it is checked rather than asserted.

This page sets no cookie, runs no analytics, and loads nothing from anywhere else. It is one file.

Permission Warning

Depending on the browser, you may be told that Brinsley can "read and change your data on the sites you visit". That is accurate about the mechanism and misleading about the use, so here is exactly what happens:

• It runs only when you click the icon. It declares no content script, so nothing happens on page load.
• It reads only the tab in front of you, and only the passage you highlighted.
• It holds no storage permission. The browser does not hand that interface to an extension that has not asked for it, so what you highlight cannot be written down.
• It makes no network request. There is no server to speak to, no account to hold, and no key to surrender.

Brinsley holds two permissions — activeTab and scripting — and no host permissions at all.

No Data Is Collected

Not anonymised, not aggregated, not "to improve the service". There is nowhere for it to go.

What It Does Not Do

Stated Here Rather Than Discovered Later.

• English only, for now.
• The level shown is an estimate from word frequency, not a measurement against the Common European Framework. That is why every card reads ~B2 and never a bare B2: the bands behind it are ours, authored by hand, and a plain letter would claim a standard we did not test against.
• It reads the page you are on. It cannot reach a file saved to your disk unless you switch on file access yourself, and it will say so plainly rather than ask you to reload.
• It is version 0.1.0. The word list is bounded and it will occasionally offer a name, or miss a word you wanted. The review table is there because of exactly that: nothing reaches your deck that you did not tick.

Price

There is no tip jar on this page and no third party to pass through. If Brinsley ever charges for anything, the price and the terms will be written here before anything is charged anywhere.

Correspondence

One published door, so that you never have to classify your own problem before writing.

Ordinary e-mail is no sealed letter: it rests, in the clear, on centralised providers at both ends.
Include no personal detail your matter does not require.