1. Select the "Edit Options" Button
2. "Allow" attentiontrust.org to install the extension
3. Click again on the Download button below
4. Select the "Install Now" button in the extension pop-up. Restart your browser.
 


 

AttentionTrust Extension Specifications and Resources

AttentionTrust Extension Specs and Resources


AttentionTrust Developers Tools

AttentionTrust Badge

AT.EX displays the attentiontrust.org badge when the user is on an approved site. This list is pulled from the following RSS feed:

http://attentiontrust.org/rss/members

AT.EX checks the feed at most once every 24 hours.
NOTE: The format is currently RSS 1.0, but will be soon migrated to RSS 2.0

Approved Services

AT.EX allows the users to select Approved Services to recieve their clickstream. The list of approved services is pulled from the following RSS feed:

http://attentiontrust.org/rss/services

AT.EX checks the feed at most once every 24 hours.

NOTE: The feed will be extended to include a Service ID number which uniquely identifies each approved service. (This will allow a service to change name or URL without affecting existing users)
NOTE: The format is currently RSS 1.0, but will be soon migrated to RSS 2.0
NOTE: The feed will be extended to include a seperate URL for the clickstreams to be sent to.

Clickstream Recording

AT.EX sends clickstreams to all selected services. The data is sent in a REST fashion, using an HTTP POST operation called via an XMLHTTPRequest call from the extension. The data is sent as a valid XML document.

<attention xmlns="http://attentiontrust.org/attention/ns#" version="0.11" recorderGUID="{7118cc65-ee56-4af0-b5fc-37205e1bc61e}" recorderVersion="0.13">
  <httpTransactions>
    <httpTransaction>
      <title>Home | AttentionTrust.org</title>
      <url>http://www.google.com/search?q=attention</url>
      <cookie>1</cookie>
      <setCookie>0</setCookie>
      <responseCode>200</responseCode>
      <method>GET</method>
      <date>Tue, 04 Oct2005 15:07:16 GMT</date>
    </httpTransaction>
  </httpTransactions>
</attention>

The fields provide the following information:

  • url: The URL loaded by the browser.

  • cookie: 1 (true) or 0 (false) indicating if a cookie was sent from the browser to the server.
  • setCookie: 1 (true) or 0 (false) indicating if a cookie was set by the server.
  • responseCode: The HTTP response code of the server. Common values are 200 (success), 301 (redirect), 404 (not found)
  • method: The method by which the browser requested the page. Typically GET, POST, or PUT.
  • title: The title of the retieved page, if any, as specified in the page's <title> tag.
  • date: The date+time that the browser requested the page, in UTF format.

NOTE: The date field reflects the user's local clock which may not be set correctly. It should only be used for relative measures of time.

User Identification

AT.EX provides no built-in mechanism for tracking users, but instead allows the service to manage this via cookies. The XMLHTTPRequest used by AT.EX allows cookies to be read and written just as for normal web pages. Thus, a service wishing to identiy a user should set a cookie upon first receiving clicstream data. This cookie will be returned with all subsequent POST's from AT.EX.

Assigning this cookie and associating it with a user on the service are both the responsibility of the service. Note, however, that a single user may be associated with several clickstreams.

For example, suppose FooService.com has an existing body of users, and Joe's user id is 25. Joe may use AT.EX at home and have his clickstream associated with cookie Z. Joe may also use AT.EXE at work and have this clickstream given cookie Y. It is up to FooService.com to assign the X and Y cookies, and to associate them both with user id 25.

A service can associate a user with a clickstream by examing the AT.EX cookie when a user logs into the service. For example, imagine that Joe has been using AT.EX at work for a while. His extension sends his clickstream to FooService.com with cookie Y. At this point, FooService does not know what user is associated with this cookie. However, Joe when logs into FooService.com, the cookie Y will be sent as well. (When a domain sets a cookie, it is returned for all subsequent requests to that domain.) Thus, FooSercie can then make the association that the clickstream from cookie Y belongs to user Joe.

Local Clickstream Recording

AT.EX also provides the possibility of recording clickstreams to the local hard disk. By default, this is stored in a file named attention_log.txt in the user's Firefox profile directory. For example, in Windows XP this directory is located here:

C:\Documents and Settings\[username]\Application Data\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\[random chars].default\attention_log.txt

The data is stored in the same XML format as described above.

Service Development & Testing

To develop a service that can accept data provided by AT.EX, you must (1) configure the recorder to send your clickstream to a URL on your server, and (2) create a URL on your service which can accept the XML data sent my AT.EX.

(1) You can have your clickstream sent to non-approved services my manually modifying the attention.attentionbankSendList preference. You can do this by typing about:config into the location bar of Firefox and then right-clicking on this preference. Multiple URLs are space delimited.

(2) A sample toolkit for accepting data from AT.EX is available here. It requires PHP and MySQL to run.

Wiki

See the attentiontrust wiki for the latest devlopments, and to participate in the development of attention tools.

Contact

If you have questions about these specs, please contact us.




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