I know the Draft integration does this, but I don’t want to switch to a new tool. I’d really like a way to beemind number of changes to a public url—lines added, removed, and modified. Beyond the obvious use case of beeminding prose editing, I think it could also be great for encouraging me to stay engaged with material where sheer length may not be the goal—keeping a todo list relevant, continuing work on a project plan, etc, etc.
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I like that idea!
But let me be Captain Obvious for a second:
(not knowing the Beeminder codebase I can of course only surmise but here goes nothing):
The word count behind a URL’s content is essentially just an integer and that needs hardly any space to store and no processing power to calculate a difference.
Actually tracking lines changed, added and removed is a whole different beast for now you have to maintain a copy of the content checked last time and calculate diffs.
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It’s a good point. Also, there’s the issue that, depending on the interval, the number comes out different. (Changes per hour? Per day? Per week?) Also, what happens when the user manually hits the update button? Seems like for this goal type to work, you’d need to enforce a consistent period, checking only once a day, always at the same time, for instance.
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I’d just write a script that automatically gets the page every hour and does a “diff” command to check for changes.
What about using the Github integration somehow ? 
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That’s actually been on my mind. But my main use case is for a todo list, and I haven’t yet figured out how I could make editing a todolist hosted on GitHub frictionless on Android. It seems like there must be a way, right?
There must be some text editing app that integrates with Github perhaps?