AutoTagging

Creating autotags

Before we add our first rule, lets spend just a couple more words on the nature of autotagging. Autotaggs are just rules, so they will work on any day in the past. This is the main difference between tags and autotaggs, so while tags are created manually, autotags are calculated for each day separately. That means that when the rules change so do autotags.

One more thing to keep in mind is that autotags can be more general or more specific than tags. For example lets say you check the news when you come from lunch. With manual tags you probably just assign those 20 minutes to 'Surfing, News' and you don't care if it was facebook, news about space or weather. With autotags it is very simple to make this tags more specific, so for example 'Surfing, Weather', 'Surfing, Social networks'....

On the other hand, when you tag some work manually you can be very specific, for example 'ManicTime, Help' with note 'Help about autotags'. This level of detail is almost impossible with autotags. I can say when I visit 'www.manictime.com/support' tag as 'ManicTime, Help', but its impossible for me to create a rule which would know what exactly I have been working on. So autotags can sometimes be more general and sometimes more specific.

Now we are ready to add some rules. Right click on any activity on other timelines and click on Add to autotag command.

Top part of the Add to autotag window shows the rule, so what ManicTime will look for. Bottom part is the tag to which you want this rule assigned. Lets say I want to tag 'facebook.com' as 'Surfing'.

Once I click Ok, autotag timeline will start to fill up. You can make any number of rules.

Matching

Lets look at the match part a bit more closely. Lets say for example that I want to tag Wikipedia as Surfing. Wikipedia has different address for each localization, so:

en.wikipedia.org
de.wikipedia.org
....

If you want to autotag wikipedia, you can use Group name contains and enter 'wikipedia.org'

This will match both en.wikipedia.org and de.wikipedia.org as well as any other locale.

One more example, lets say I want to add Google reader to autotag 'Surfing, Google reader'
Google reader has URL addresses like
http://www.google.com/reader/view/#stream/feed/http://scobleizer.wordpress.com/feed/

So group is www.google.com and that is no good. I can use title contains and for the title specify 'http://www.google.com/reader/'

You can also add a group to autotag. Right click on a group in summary part (bottom right) and choose Add to autotag.

You can also add any filter you can think of. Type it into filter box, then click on the down arrow on the right side and choose Add to autotag.

Autotag Editor

Sooner or later you will need to delete rules, rename autotags... you can do that in AutoTag Editor. To open it, click on Autotag Editor command on timeline menu.

You can also edit autotag by right clicking on autotag and choose Edit autotag.

Reports

You can use timesheet to generate AutoTag reports. On the Timesheet, choose AutoTags timeline as a source timeline.

Other features of TimeSheet work in the same way as with tags.