I would like to turn to the common knowledge with this question. Maybe there are known solutions that I could use before going on new rounds of effort and trial.
I am trying to beemind posting regularly to my personal blog at BlogSpot. So far, so good, the goal has been really successful in pushing me to write a little something every now and then, which is exactly what I wanted. Actually, I started to think and post ahead, and almost never skated the edge, which is why I never ran into the big issue with the goal setup until some five months into its existence.
Currently, I am using the URLminder feature to parse the feed created by FeedBurner. It was not until today (when I derailed despite making a post) that I realized that FeedBurner actually truncates the feed after 6 posts (currently based on some random parameter? always exactly 6?). So in fact my progress with the goal was about writing posts that are longer and longer, not the bare number of words per week as I intended. And I only realized this when the newest post turned out shorter than the 7th post down! (Yeah, I suspected that numbers felt off at some point but never imagined the scale)
So I am looking for an alternative setup. Any other feed-generating mechanism that is compatible with BlogSpot and is proven to work well with Beeminder? I am looking forward to any suggestions!
Did a little detective work, and it looks like this feed might contain all your posts? Not knowing Russian(?) it’s a little difficult for me to tell.
Thanks for a prompt response! That’s interesting. It contains all posts but the very first one. Which may mean it also counts only 25 most recent posts. (UPD: ran a test by adding a test post, the oldest that had appeared in the feed disappeared; so it does indeed only show the top 25 posts. Thanks anyway!)
(Yes, Russian this is)
If you’re willing to explore solutions other than URLMinder, you could use Integromat to watch a feed for new items and post a data point when it sees one. You could probably structure it in such a way as to fit within Integromat’s free plan. However having it post word count would probably be tricky, though you might be able to get close using the split text function to split on a space char and then the length array function on the resulting array.
For posterity, here is what I did, using @narthur’s very helpful suggestion. I will also report here if I encounter an issue with the set-up later.
Using Integromat (so far it seems that the free plan will be more than enough, as my other integrations are running through IFTTT and Zapier, so the entire Integromat’s allowance is for this one), I created a recipe that “watches” my blog. Then I used their internal converter to turn the HTML code to plain text as the intermediary step. The final step triggers adding a datapoint to the beeminder goal. For the actual value of the datapoint, it uses their “length” operator on the result of the HTML=>text conversion. So the resulting value is the number of characters in any new post.
I had to create a new goal for this because the previous one was “odometer” type and counted words. The new one is a do-more and counts characters.
Will report back if this setup turns out to work not as intended in some specific scenarios.