Recording Your Attention: Spying on Yourself — J Wynia

J’s put up an attention service for himself, much as I’ve done. He has, however, taken the time to give a basic run-down of the very simple procedure for getting one running.

I only have 1 thing to add to J’s list of 14 steps to recording your own attention: remember that the custom service potential of the Attention Recorder is not part of the GA functionality. As you can see from J’s points 12 and 13, you have to go into your about:config to add the custom service. It goes further than that, though. Apparently by design, the custom service address is stripped out any time you click “OK” in the Attention Options dialog box.

For the intrepid, there’s a patch available here that resolves this issue. Unfortunately you’ll need to expode the attention.jar file, replace attention.js, and rezip the jar file in order to get this functionality. If there’s sufficient interest I can give more detailed steps to do so. I’d like to convince the development staff of the attention recorder that this is bad functionality and commit the fix to the project, but haven’t had the momentum to initiate that discussion yet.