By dreeves

It’s official! Beemind anything with an RSS feed!

This is a slightly nerd-oriented integration but copying and pasting URLs around is really the only skill you need to set this up. And then once it’s set up, you don’t need to do anything at all ever (except for the thing you’re beeminding of course). That being the point of an autodata integration.

So the way this works is you give Beeminder an RSS feed — a URL that probably ends in ".rss" or "/feed" or maybe ".xml" — and Beeminder gives you a +1 every time a new item appears in that feed. RSS feeds are commonly used to track new blog posts on a blog but they can be anything. Wikipedia can give you the backstory. Or just check out these examples of beemindable RSS feeds that we and our beta users came up with and you’ll get the idea:

1. GoodReads gives you an RSS link on your profile page of all the books you read. (If you know of other websites that give you an RSS feed of your activity, let us know!)
2. Make a journal thread in the Life category of the forum and beemind posting to it — just append ".rss" to the end of the URL for your thread. (Note: It counts other people’s posts too, which may be fine — you’re posting interesting enough stuff to generate discussion!)
3. Beemind your (and only your) contributions to the forum in general, with a URL like forum.beeminder.com/u/USERNAME/activity.rss (I’m doing this myself).
4. Publish more YouTube videos. To get the RSS URL, right-click on your channel’s page, "view page source", then control-f for "feeds" and grab the URL that looks like youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCASoR5UzKZZFiJ6gzE-ChWw.
5. Obviously if you have your own blog you should beemind posting to it. We sure as heck wouldn’t have managed to blog for 12 years and counting without doing that. Pretty much all blogging software makes it easy to get an RSS feed of the posts. For example, if you blog on Substack the RSS feed lives at a URL like yootles.substack.com/feed.
6. Various things you may currently be doing with IFTTT? We recommend RSSminder over IFTTT.
7. For Twitter of course you’d want to use our direct Twitter integration but if you’ve fled to Mastodon for any reason, RSS feeds are the way to go!

The sky’s the limit here. We’re excited to see what else people come up with!

Feed the Bee!

Tags: bee-all, case studies, integrations, nerdery, quantified self, rationality

Beeminder is goal-tracking with teeth. We plot your progress on a graph with a Bright Red Line (formerly Yellow Brick Road). If your datapoints cross that line, we take your money.

The Beeminder blog is a hodgepodge of productivity nerdery and behavioral economics written by the founders and various friends.

Eating our own Dog Food

Does Beeminder sound super crazypants? Just confusing? One of the first things you may want to check out is our User's Guide for New Bees. Check out other posts we're most proud of by clicking the "best-of" tag below. If you're a glutton for honey, the "bee-all" tag has everything we still think is worth reading. Other good ones are the "rationality" and "science" tags, if you're into that.

akrasia akrasia horizon api bee-all best-of bugs buzz case studies commitment contracts commitment devices competition dog food economics FAQ fitness food force majeure get everything done guest posts integrations lifehacks mark forster meta money navel-gazing nerdery new features press productivity porn PSA psychology quantified self rationality resolutions road dial science self-binding soup nazi startups stickk tagtime tips trello weight loss yellow brick road

Most of the action is in the Beeminder forum. Or if you want to be slightly social without risking getting distracted arguing on the internet, you can do pomodoros online in sync with other Beeminder users and productivity nerds in the Beeminder coworking room on Complice.

Akrasia (ancient Greek ἀκρασία, "lacking command over oneself"; adjective: "akratic") is the state of acting against one's better judgment, not doing what one genuinely wants to do. It encompasses procrastination, lack of self-control, lack of follow-through, and any kind of addictive behavior.
wikipedia.org/wiki/Akrasia