● Obscure Netlify Subdomain

311 2026-08-06 note ☽︎ ♂︎

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,… needs a public URL, which rules out anything private. The workaround is obscurity. Deploy the rendered manuscript feedThe writerdeck pushes to a private git repo, one commit per session, and the same discipline as this site's own daily-commit habit. Commits are the only telemetry, there's no cloud sync or background daemon watching the manuscript folder. A post-commit… to Netlify under a subdomain that's a long random string rather than a chosen name, eg. x7q2m9vb4k1p.netlify.app.

No custom domain, no link from this site, no sitemap entry. The only two places that string exists are the Beeminder goal configuration and the Netlify dashboard. The manuscript stays functionally private while still satisfying an Odometer-type goal that has to read a publicly fetchable page.

It's the same trade cool URIsA Pew Research Center study found 38% of webpages that existed in 2013 were gone by 2023, and 54% of Wikipedia pages have at least one dead reference link. This site's own answer is stub pages: a link that would… warn against for anything meant to last, an unmemorable path is fragile if it ever needs to be shared on purpose. I think that's fine here, as the point is that it's never shared.

Deploys straight from the render script'sThe writerdeck pushes to a private git repo, one commit per session, and the same discipline as this site's own daily-commit habit. Commits are the only telemetry, there's no cloud sync or background daemon watching the manuscript folder. A post-commit… output directory, same netlify deploy --prod flow as other static sites, just pointed at one .txt file instead of a build folder.