For quite some time, one of the most popular feature requests has been the ability to associate web sites and documents with keywords. Today, we are bringing this capability to Slife Web. It’s very cool.

Let’s say you would like to associate the keyword “wall street journal” or “wsj.com” with the “Reading News” activity. Click on the “Activities” tab on the left and hit the “Associations” link for the “Reading News” activity. This is what you will see:

At the top are the associations you might have already made by going into the “Applications” and “Web & Docs” views. Now, there’s another section at the bottom where you can enter keywords.

Slife is always trying to match document and web page titles and urls with your keywords. When it finds a match, it counts time towards the activity the keyword is under. The match doesn’t have to be exact. As long as the keyword is contained within a title or url, it will work.

Give it a try and let us know how this feature is working for your, we would love to hear your feedback. Since today is Monday, it’s also time for this week’s worklist. We are in the middle of a big update to Slife Teams and that will be our main focus the next few days. We also plan to do a little bit of work to make sure this new keyword feature is working very smoothly for everybody.

The first half of the week has been all about open source for us. We released the Slife 2.5 client late last Friday and have been updating our web site and announcing the news over the last couple of days.

Starting today and throughout the rest of the week we will be changing gears. It’s time to move Slife Web, Slife Teams and all of our server setup to a new cloud-based infrastructure. We will be announcing any downtime here and also in our Twitter feed.

And we are back from our quick break, more energized than ever. It’s surprising how just a few days off can make such a big difference.

In the wake of our return, we see that the Wall Street Journal has published a story titled “Tools to Manage Online Time Wisely“. It profiles Slife and similar tools such as RescueTime. Andrea Coombes wrote the article – we had a very nice conversation with her a week ago and knew the story was coming, but didn’t know exactly when.

Ok, now it’s time to get back to work. We have lots of items on the to-do list. By the end of the week we hope to be able to announce more details about our open source plans and availability of Slife v2.0. We know there’s a lot of people interested and we can’t wait to unleash it to the world.

Lots going on this week here at Slife Labs:

• Slife Development: All the items mentioned last week – Slife Windows client, Slife Teams, etc – are still very much on our plate as we continue to improve these products.
• Open Source Client: We are getting closer to releasing the Slife v2.0 client as open source, like we’ve announced a couple of months ago. We are really looking forward to this.
• Hosting: We have started transitioning our server infrastructure. For now, we are switching most of our static content. The heavy lifting will begin later this week, when we port the database and the web applications. We will definitely give you some early notice so that you are aware of when it’s happening exactly.

What’s happening this week? Lots! This is one of those weeks when we are working on so many small (and big) things that it’s even hard to make a proper work list, like we usually do. But here are some of the highlights:

• Slife Clients: Work on Slife Windows client continues. Making good progress here, and it should be done soon.
• Slife Teams: We’ve been incorporating feedback that we’ve received recently. Ability to configure activities at the Team level and much more.
• Hosting: Have you heard of the cloud? I am sure you have! We are in the process of moving our server infrastructure from dedicated servers to a much more scalable setup, based on Rackspace’s cloud computing network. We will try to transition with as little disruption as possible and will be writing more about this as well.

Ok, this week’s work list is late. How is it possible that we are in the middle of the week already? So much fun work to do, so little time:

• Slife Clients: Following the work that we did on the Slife Mac client not too long ago, we are now spending a bit of time addressing some issues with the Slife Windows client.
• Slife Teams: We’ve been making some changes to Slife Teams behind the scenes and making it more useful as an awareness tool.
• Slife Consulting: This is a new initiative that we are working on. The idea is to offer consulting services to companies large and small in the area of time management and awareness. More details on this soon.

This week our attention will be centered on two items:

• Slife Mac Client Update: Testing of the Slife Mac client is done. The update includes Adobe Photoshop CS4 support, Adobe Illustrator CS4 support and also improved security when sending activity data back to our servers.
• Productivity Plus Release: We are working on a surprise feature/service that we will be announcing on Monday next week. All we can say is that it’s about productivity, and as far as we know, it has never been done before. We are very excited about it! So, this week, it’s all about testing, testing and more testing.

This week we don’t have much of a work list, but a delivery list. We are introducing an update that includes lots of improvements to the Slife Web UI and the client as well. This is what you will see by the end of the week, if not sooner:

• Adobe CS4 Support: We are pretty happy to say that the Slife client on the Mac now supports Photoshop and Illustrator. Slife v3.0.2 will be available as auto-update in a few days. We are almost done with testing, things are looking good
• Application Icons: In the Slife Web UI, some applications don’t have icons. We are constantly adding new icons, but you won’t have to wait for us any longer. You will be able to set icons for applications yourself.
• Activity Associations: Right now it’s fairly simple to associate apps and documents with activities, but there’s no way to click on an activity and see which apps/docs are linked to it. That’s changing with this update
• Activity Association Labels: When an application, document or web site is associated with an activity, the activity name(s) will be listed under the app/doc/site name in their respective views.

In addition to these, we also have a couple of features that we will be announcing soon as well. Stay close.

This week is pretty much a continuation of the work we started last week, so nothing too exciting to report in terms of development. But we are very close to rolling out some of the interface improvements we’ve mentioned in previous worklists, and that will be great. The ETA for that is sometime next week.

Our worklist for this week. Not as many development items as we get ready to release a few improvements to the web interface, probably early next week.

• Slife Web UI: Almost done with this item, which has been on our plate for a couple of weeks now. Great stuff.
• Application Icons: You might have noticed that some application icons are missing and are replaced with the default app icon. We are going to be adding new icons soon, and give users the ability to choose an icon for any application as well.
• Adobe CS4: If you missed the previous post, we are trying to learn more about options for tracking Photoshop and Illustrator. We hope to have more details soon.
• Videos: We are planning a new video section with a few short clips on how to create activities, associate them with items, etc. There are lots of Slife features that many people are probably not too familiar with. We hope the videos will fix that.