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.