⚹ Beeminder

344 2026-07-24 bookmark

A commitment device: set a numeric goal, draw a yellow brick road toward it on a graph, and pay real money if you fall off. The two goals riding on this repo, one on commit count and one on cumulative word count via /urlminder.txt, are both Beeminder goals, and both exist because the old commit trackerMy old /github Beeminder goal tracked commits across every repository on GitHub, until GitHub's API changed to only allow tracking one repository at a time. Most active projects had already moved to GitLab and Source.tube anyway. The repository of this… stopped working and something had to replace it.

The word-count goal is specifically an Odometer-type goal, via URLminderA Beeminder integration that counts the words at any publicly accessible URL, normally used with Google Docs. Raw HTML inflates the count, but it's accurate with plain text, which is the reason /urlminder.txt exists as a route on this site,…: it reads a running total off a public URL rather than a daily delta, which is why the feed can only ever grow, never shrink, no matter how many old entriesThe first entry. This site exists for gitminder as the daily-commit driver for two Beeminder goals, and it leans on wiki-links ,like colour-theory to connect ideas as they accumulate, in the tradition of a digital garden more than a blog.[^1]… get lightly edited later. See Static Site GeneratorsA static site generator takes markdown and templates and compiles them into plain HTML files with no server-side code and no database. For a digital garden that's meant to be worked on continuously, the boring reliability is a great asset.… for the mechanics of how that feed gets built.

It's not the first attempt at a word-count goal. The old Draft editor used to report daily word count automatically before it shut down, and Bearminder was a since-abandoned Swift macOS app meant to send Bear's word count the same way. URLminder against a static feed turned out to need neither a dedicated app nor a service that could disappear.