Just started a simple newsletter with tinyletter. I want to make sure I keep regular in my updates. I couldn’t think of / see an easy way to connect tinyletter and BM. There’s no IFTTT hookup, and I can’t seem to find an RSS feed for Tinyletter (though that may appear once I’ve written my first post).
I was wondering if anyone has any experience with this? I could just keep it manual, but that adds extra hassle.
Thoughts appreciated.
First thought: subscribe the email bot to the letter! Currently the bot wants “username/goalname” in the subject but maybe we could make up alternate syntax for the body if we could think of something that wouldn’t just look ugly to the human readers. Like in the newsletter signature you’d have something like: Beeminder-autodata(bmndr.com/strickvl/newsletter): ^ 1 "blah blah"
I actually don’t mind manually updating some goals. Like UVIs and beemails, I’m already tweeting/sending something manually so tacking on the habit of updating the graph is no big deal. And I use the comment for a more concise description of what it was about which can be useful for scanning through them in the future.
Still, it would be cool to automate the [beeminding of] sending of certain kinds of emails!
One more idea: A gmail email filter that gives them all a specific label. Then beemind it as an odometer goal. Not exactly automated but no issue of forgetting to update it, since you can just tell Beeminder the current label count whenever it eeps at you.
PS: Can I get in on this newsletter?
When I had a goal like this I added it manually. You can’t sign beebot or IFTTT up to the tinyletter because of the initial confirmation email, and tinyletter don’t have an RSS feed.
Subscribe yourself to your newsletter, and have IFTTT watch your inbox for
a matching sender. I do something similar to track submissions to a Google
Form.
Thanks, all. I left planet Google (because creepiness) so all the fun tools that run around in your inbox aren’t available to me. For now I think I’ll have to just make it a manual goal.
The blog mailing list is here but my newsletter will be in Arabic, which I’m thinking might be a problem for you 
Nevertheless, gluttons for punishment can sign up here.
Well, anything that beebot doesn’t understand, it calls in the humans to help. So the initial confirmation seems like it’d less of a problem than the ongoing mails. (i.e. we can confirm subscriptions manually in support.)
Maybe we need to handle a Beeminder modeline at the bottom of such mails:
# beeminder.com : strickvl/arabicnewsletter 1 "issue 1":
To be clever and human-friendly while self-promoting, it could be a URL that the beebot interprets as needing a datapoint but that for a human just lands them on the graph page where they can see the countdown to the next issue:
https://www.beeminder.com/strickvl/arabicnewsletter?beebot=�%201%204fabulousness4
Edit: updated to use the more obvious (but harder to include in a URL) format of ^ 1 "fabulousness"
You could subscribe the IFTTT email channel to your newsletter, if you’re not already using it. Only problem is IFTTT has to confirm the address you’ll be sending from, which will be a problem TinyLetter uses a no-reply address and doesn’t let you configure.