WordPress + Beeminder = Happy Blogger
I've been using Beeminder for a couple of months now, and I've grown rather fond of its stick based approach to goal achievement.
However, one of the biggest problems I have with the service is the data entry side. Although it's pretty easy to add new data, frequently entering new data points can add a little friction to the whole process.
Thankfully the folks at Beeminder released an API a few weeks, so I've been playing around with ways of integrating it with my work flow. One thing I've wanted to do for a long time is blog more frequently, so a WordPress plugin to notify Beeminder when I post seemed like a good idea.
So here it is.
Beeminder Ping
Beeminder Ping is a really simple plugin for WordPress that notifies Beeminder whenever a post is published. Amazing features include:
- Notify a Beeminder goal with a single value when a post is published. Good for "post 5 times a week" style goals.
- Notify a Beeminder with the word count of a newly published post. Perfect for "write 1,000 words a week" style goals.
- Only notify Beeminder for newly published posts, not edited posts or ones that have been moved from published -> draft -> published.
You can download the latest release from the Beeminder Ping page, either as a tar.gz file or a zip. Once installed, you can enable the different notification types and set which goals should be pinged.
beeminder-api
As Carl Sagan would say, if you want to write Beeminder Ping, you must first create the universe. Luckily the universe is already here, but I needed a way to interface with the API using PHP, so I wrote beeminder-api. It's still a work-in-progress, but you can download the source from GitHub and play around with it. Please let me know if anything is broken, missing, or just plain sucks.
9 Comments
Carl Sagan would be so proud :-)
Phil, this is so great! Thank you so much for making this available!
Can we make you an owner of github.com/beeminder so you can add your php library there?
We're adding this to the beeminder blog now and will let you know how it works! (I'll probably add it to my other blog, Messy Matters too.)
@Daniel - Beeminder is a great service, so it's the least I can do :) I'd be happy for you to add me as an owner on Github too.
Great! What's your github username?
And we've been using your Wordpress plugin for the Beeminder blog and it works like a charm! Thanks again!
My GitHub username is sodaware.
Glad everything is working!
Hey Phil, I added you on GitHub.
One quibble with the WordPress plugin I just noticed: If I edit a past post then it submits another datapoint to Beeminder. Not intentional, right? We can push a fix if you want, once this is in http://github.com/beeminder
Thanks Daniel, I'll get that setup today. I thought I'd fixed the double-datapoint bug, but now I realise that editing a post that was published without Beeminder being pinged will send a datapoint. I'll release a fix today as well.
Thanks for telling us about this! I'm going to install it now.
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